
Class 



UU:. .. 






COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



SOME NEGLECTED ASPECTS 
OF WAR 



SOME 

NEGLECTED ASPECTS 

OF WAR 

By 

CAPTAIN A. T. MAHAN, U. S. N. 

Author of "The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783," 
" The Interest of America in Sea Power," etc. 

Together with 

THE POWER THAT MAKES FOR PEACE 

By Henry S. Pritchett 

Formerly President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

And 

THE CAPTURE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY AT SEA 

By Julian S. Corbett 

Lecturer in History to the Naval War Course 



BOSTON 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1907 



iLid^ftttV ovOONGHE.Ss! 
\ fvvo Copies Received I 

1 NOV 23 1907 

ioLAi^ (X. XKc. i\oJ 






Copyright, i8gg. 
By The North American Review Publishing Co. 

Copyright, igo'/. 
By Houghton, Mifflin, and Company. 

Copyright, igoy. 
By a. T. Mahan. 



All rights reserved 
Published November, 1907 



COLONIAL PRESS 

Electrotyped and Printed by C H. Simonds 6r> Co. 

Boston, U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

THE cause of Universal Peace, upon which 
so much of the world's attention has been 
fixed this summer by the Hague Conference, can 
progress surely to success only upon the same 
conditions by which any other movement for good 
reaches its goal. It will not be advanced, but 
retarded, by neglecting diligently and calmly to 
consider facts, to look them straight in the face ; to 
see things as they are, and not merely as one would 
wish to see them now, or as it is possible that our 
descendants may be privileged to see in a future 
happier age. 

Among many perversions of thought and result- 
ant exaggerations of statement, by the uncon- 
ditional advocates of Arbitration, there is one 
which underlies all others. This is, that War not 
merely is an evil, which like other evils we should 
labor to reduce, and ultimately to abolish ; but 
that, having reference to the existing state of 
things, it is so essentially unreasonable and wicked 



viii Preface 

that there can be for it no necessity, nor justifi- 
cation. From this point of view War serves no 
purpose that cannot, — in the existing state of 
things, — be otherwise and peacefully accom- 
plished. It is merely killing people, a breach of the 
sixth commandment, by those who call themselves 
Christians; or, as one very prominent opponent 
has said, — and I doubt not many have echoed, — 
It is impossible to reconcile War with the teachings 
of Jesus Christ. 

This all amounts to saying that it is wicked for 
society to organize and utilize force for the control 
of evil. It will scarcely be denied that evil in 
various forms now exists; not evil of thought or 
word merely, but evil of act; of overt violence, 
legal as well as extra-legal; evil aggressive, per- 
sistent, insolent, and ultimately subversive, if 
unchecked, of all social order and personal happi- 
ness. Nor will it, I imagine, be denied, granted a 
careful appreciation of conditions, that such tend- 
encies towards violence arise from time to time 
throughout huge homogeneous masses of mankind, 
nations and races ; tendencies resting, indeed, not 
upon ordinary criminal impulse, but upon ambi- 
tions or necessities incident to their present posi- 
tion, or present wants. Nor, again, can there be 



Prejace ix 

serious dispute that successful evil, supported 
by organized force, sits often in peace upon a 
throne, from which it can be deposed only by 
force. 

The organizations of mankind called nations 
have established over themselves agencies known 
to us as governments ; the objects of which are the 
maintenance of internal order and prosperity, and 
of the external rights and interests of the peoples 
they represent. Could the people, having made 
this disposition of the national functions, become 
thereafter thoroughly neutral and passive as re- 
gards the conduct of their affairs, as do most of the 
stockholders in a corporation; could considera- 
tions of administration and relations with other 
peoples be abandoned with indifference to the 
governments ; it may be conceivable that the pro- 
prietors of the big estates thus constituted might 
agree among themselves to administer in such wise 
as to avoid quarrelling. Although the experience 
of history, under absolute rulers, does not bear out 
this pleasing supposition, corporations, small organ- 
ized bodies, doubtless can reach agreement more 
easily than do unorganized masses. As a matter 
of fact, however, governments do not possess this 
freedom of action, which, if held, we may presume 



X Prejace 

they would utilize with pure regard to the welfare 
of those under them; as despotisms and directo- 
rates notoriously do. Behind every government, 
even the most absolute, lie the masses of the people, 
with all the stormy impulses and pressing needs 
that characterize the individual man, multiplied 
by numbers, and intensified by the interaction of 
complaint and mutual excitation, in social inter- 
course and through the press. While a govern- 
ment can in some degree modify and guide the 
popular passion and interest thus aroused, its 
powers in these directions are limited. Like all 
elemental forces, popular pressure may be influ- 
enced, but not withstood. The time comes when 
Government becomes merely the agency for its 
exertion. The reins fall from the hands of the 
ruler. Is it permissible, in such case, for the nation 
or people threatened to supply that restraint which 
can no longer be exercised by the native consti- 
tuted authorities ? Is it right to resort to force to 
withstand force? If so, there is War; or its 
equivalent. 

I do not say that the future may not show happier 
conditions, for which the present should labor. I 
speak only of the present. Of this present, an 
eminent American has been quoted as saying that 



Preface xi 

there is now no more reason for two nations to go 
to war, than for himself and another to settle a 
difficulty with clubs. Says another, similarly emi- 
nent, " War settles only which nation is the 
stronger." Both of these gentlemen had seen, 
like myself, War free four million slaves, and 
estabhsh on this continent a united people; a 
contribution towards the world's peace and the 
welfare of North America, in sparing the expenses 
of large standing armies, and the woes of probable 
collisions, which not a dozen Hague Conferences 
will effect. " War settles only which is the 
stronger ! " The War of Secession then settled 
nothing, except that the North was stronger than 
the South. War, it appears, settled neither the 
question of slavery nor that of the Union. In the 
conditions which had previously existed, — present 
then as our present is now, — in the hardening 
opinions and feelings of the South, and the growing 
resolve of the North to restrict slavery, it was, it 
seems, quite possible to free the slaves and main- 
tain the Union without war. The War did not 
settle those questions. The assertion will not hold 
water with those who can remember those ante- 
cedent times, or who now will reflectively study 
the successive stages of the agitation over 



xii Preface 

slavery. According to the authority first quoted, 
it would have been as possible to settle the 
dispute by some equitable adjustment, as for 
the two supposed combatants to lay down their 
clubs. And this in the face of the long history 
of efforts so to adjust, from the Missouri Compro- 
mise of 1820 to the Kansas Nebraska Bill and the 
Fugitive Slave Law of 1854, — the hfetime of 
a generation. With all the advantages of a 
united government, of the impassioned eloquence, 
ardent patriotism, and love for the Union which 
inspired Clay and Webster in their efforts to avert 
the calamity by arbitration, by compromise, the 
interest and feelings of the masses of men behind 
them swept away all barriers. The strife of a 
century reached through four years of war a 
solution not otherwise possible. Yet the state- 
ments quoted are but moderate among their kind 
at Peace Conferences. 

A curious illustration of a tone of mind pre- 
dominant in the agitation for Universal Arbitra- 
tion, as now conducted, has come to me since the 
preceding lines were written. I have received 
from England the following letter, which, being 
anonymous, has not the claim to privacy which 
a signature carries. 



Preface xiii 

"Sir: — 
" I have just read your article in July ' National 
Review ' on the subject of the ' Hague Conference ' 
and deeply regret to find that you have used the 
great talent God gave you for the welfare of man- 
kind to uphold and encourage instead War which 
is literally Hell upon earth, and the curse of 
mankind, at this exceedingly critical period when 
your opinion might have proved a feather weight 
in the scale in favour of International Arbitration. 
May God forgive you, and lead you to an altered 
and better mind. 

"A Lover of My Fellov^ Creatures." 

To ask thus solemnly that God may forgive 
a man is to pronounce his guilt before God. Why? 
Because of the antecedent assumption, that all 
War is so certainly and entirely wicked, that a 
man cannot without sin present before the audi- 
ence of his kind such considerations as those 
contained in the article, herein re-published, 
"The Practical Aspect of War." That the 
author thereof may be conscientiously assured 
of the rightness of his contention counts for 
nothing; no opposite side of the case is ad- 
mitted, as to War. The judge, in virtue of his 



xiv Preface 

personal convictions, takes the seat of the Almighty, 
and unhesitatingly declares the wickedness of his 
fellow. Judgment is passed by one neither com- 
missioned nor competent to it; a procedure as 
unchristian in spirit, and in manifestation, as War 
can be. And less useful ; for, like the fanaticism 
of the extreme total abstainers, it tends to divide 
those who should work in mutual toleration for a 
common object. 

I must forbear extended discussion here, lest I 
transfer the body of my text to the Preface. There 
is, however, one fallacy in the line of thought under- 
lying the Arbitration Movement, as too often engi- 
neered, which must be clearly recognized; for 
fallacies are in their working as insidious as 
bacteria are in theirs. It is quietly assumed, 
apparently without a suspicion of mistake, that in 
our highly organized society, — the society of 
European civilization, — the individual man has 
surrendered himself, soul and body, to the law; 
and that, by analogy, states can do the same, all 
that is needed being to ascertain a means. The 
individual man has indeed surrendered much; 
but there are large reservations, without which 
law itself would be a hideous tyranny. The 
individual has surrendered certain natural rights 



Preface xv 

for varied motives; motives of evident interest; 
motives in many of mere submission to force, as 
with the criminal class ; motives in others of con- 
science, of subjection of personal advantage to the 
general weal. But alongside of this, always 
latent, often expressed, runs the reservation of 
conscience. To no law of man shall men concede 
authority to make them do what conscience says 
is wrong. The history of the ages witnesses to 
the truth and power of this reservation. My own 
time has seen it. Men are yet living who said, 
'' You may pass your Fugitive Slave Law ; we 
will not obey." Seward's expression, " the higher 
law," embodied this resolution; and that higher 
law is not enacted in human courts. It will not 
respect human decisions, and to the last day it 
will use force, passive or active, when in its power 
so to maintain the right, as conscience gives it to 
see it. 

But some may urge that the story of the War of 
Secession is by now but an echo 

" Of old, unhappy, far-off things, 
And battles long ago." 

They have no application to our better present. 
Better ! Is it better that men, in order to spare 



xvi Prejace 

their purses and their comfort, should arbitrate a 
question of conscience, rather than stand up for 
principle, and give their lives as did the men of 
1 86 1, North and South, to maintain what they 
believed to be fundamental right? If, indeed, it 
be true that our present is thus essentially different, 
the raw material of human nature has changed 
more in these forty years than in twenty centuries 
precedent. External conditions of offence, amen- 
able to settlement only by force, have not changed. 
Let those who think that they have recall that 
within fifteen years Japan has twice found it essen- 
tial to go to war on account of interests in Korea ; 
interests by her esteemed so vital to her people and 
their future that she could not with honor submit 
the decision of them to any judgment but her own. 
Let them study in contemporary journals, and 
periodicals, or in more formal treatises, if such 
there be, the transactions of the years immediately 
preceding the recent war between Japan and 
Russia, the contentions and actions of either party. 
There is no law existent applicable to such cases. 
And while the Hague Conference itself is sitting, 
Japan has felt compelled for the third time to an in- 
tervention, which is not War only because there is 
no power to resist. Forcible intervention is in es- 



Preface xvii 

sence War. The persuasion that War, as an 
inevitable factor in history, is a thing of the past, 
is a public prepossession which will disappear 
as men study questions of international relations 
in their world-wide bearing; which very few 
do. There are at this moment pending before 
the world, unnoted by most, momentous differ- 
ences which cannot be settled by arbitration, 
because they involve the oppositions of nations 
and races, and cannot be brought under the 
head of any of those accepted conventions that 
we call law. Such are collisions of elemental 
forces, amid which preparation for War will 
play a mighty part, may insure peace, and may 
determine the decisive solution. 

The phrase " honor and vital interests " em- 
bodies the conscience of states. Honor, or its 
cognate, honesty, speaks for itself; neither man 
nor nation should consent to that which is before 
God a shame, to do, or to allow. " Vital '^ inter- 
ests are those of the community, and of posterity. 
They therefore are interests " in trust; " it belongs 
neither to the government nor to the people of one 
generation to abandon the decision of them to 
an outside tribunal, — to commit to any legal body 
that which law in itself is not competent to decide. 



xviii Preface 

We speak of law with bated breath, as though it 
were some self-existent Being; a reverence prob- 
ably due to the superabundance of lawyers in 
representative governments. Law in truth is 
the creation of the state, of the people. It is a 
functionary, with methods and powers by them 
prescribed, as to any other official; and it de- 
pends for its efficiency upon the physical force 
behind it, of the state, — of the organized people. 
When it is unable to act, as was the law of the 
United States for four years in the seceding states, 
— as pointed out by General Sherman, quoted in 
the following articles, — the physical force of the 
people, always its latent support, must be called 
into active exertion ; and when it fails in particular 
localities, through the timidity or weakness of in- 
dividual citizens, — as apparently in New Orleans 
some twenty years ago, and in other known 
instances, — it is permissible for the community, 
from whom law derives, to resume into its own 
hands the duties of its delinquent servant. The 
mandates of law are simply the register of past 
decisions reached by the people upon precedent 
conditions; and when unprecedented conditions 
arise, law, unless ex post facto, is paralyzed, for 
want of mandate. A new decision must be taken ; 



Preface xix 

a new instruction issued. A large proportion of 
the questions embraced under honor and vital 
interests to-day are precisely in that inchoate 
condition, of non-decision and possibly even of 
dispute, which cannot be brought under the head 
of law. The question of Slavery was such. In- 
numerable efforts were made to bring it into 
harness by law, and to law. They failed, because 
they were dealing with men's consciences, their 
honor and vital interests; and so will fail at- 
tempts thus to adjust other subjects of difference 
mentioned in the following text. These rep- 
resent a play of forces, moral as well as mate- 
rial; and woe will be to those who dismiss 
from their account the organized force we call 
War. 

There is a third consideration, a further element 
affecting War as a probable incident of interna- 
tional relations, in the very changed character 
of most governments within the last century. 
" The people " have always greatly influenced 
external political movement, because popular 
feelings must weigh with rulers ; and also, doubt- 
less, because governors, being usually of the same 
flesh and blood as the governed, share the national 
desires and modes of thought. Nevertheless, the 



XX Preface 

order of rulers, few in numbers, once ruled in a 
weightier sense than they now do; and by long 
practice mastered and developed their business 
to some useful extent from generation to genera- 
tion. The influence of the people has now become 
far more direct and consequently powerful. The 
people, rather than their representatives, have 
become the rulers ; but as yet they have not been 
so long enough to learn their business. The im- 
pulses of mankind remain ; the directive force, of 
those who can and will spare time to comprehend 
the conditions which affect international relations 
has diminished. The rightfulness of a national 
contention, the expediency of going to war, the 
necessity of a state of preparation, will henceforth 
be determined with continuously increasing influ- 
ence by the people themselves. Until this inevi- 
table change has proceeded long enough to produce 
a maturity of education in the people at large, they 
may save on the war budget ; but they will not be 
equipped to control impulse by considerations of 
instructed reason. Responsibility, also, when 
distributed among the many instead of concen- 
trated in the few, ceases to restrain. During this 
transition period the danger of war will not be less, 
but greater. Is it wrong to provide against such 



Preface xxi 

a contingency ? or shall we meet it effectually by 
grounding our arms? 

Believing as I do in the weight of the considera- 
tions here summarized, and convinced that the 
cause of Peace itself is jeopardized by the exaggera- 
tions and oversights of its noisier followers, I have 
thought expedient to collect under one cover a few 
articles, in which the rationale and justification of 
War and of its procedure have been considered 
under different aspects. Of these, one, the Moral 
Aspect of War, has already been republished in my 
book, " Lessons of the War with Spain." I have 
thought permissible to bring it forward here again, 
into immediate connection with the others, as 
necessary to any complete treatment of the subject, 
however elementary; and because the collection 
thus made, being homogeneous in object, will be 
available as a ground- work for future discussion — 
for expansion — should the agitation against War 
develop contrary to, or beyond, fact and reason. 

In conclusion, I have to express my great obli- 
gation to Mr. Henry S. Pritchett, formerly Presi- 
dent of the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- 
nology, and to Mr. Julian S. Corbett, so well and 
favorably known for the series of works on naval 
subjects proceeding from his pen, beginning with 



xxii Preface 

" Drake and the Tudor Navy," for their kindness 
in acceding to my request to repubhsh herein the 
articles which will be found attributed to them. 
I further owe it to them to say, explicitly, that, 
beyond this kind permission and the articles them- 
selves, they have no responsibility for any expres- 
sion of fact or opinion that may be found between 
the two covers of this book. 

My thanks are also due to the several Maga- 
zines, in which these papers first appeared, for 
permission to reproduce them in this form. The 
particular acknowledgments will be found under 
the title of each article. 

A. T. Mahan. 

September, 1907. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Power That Makes for Peace . . . i 

The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1907 
By Henry S. Pritchett 

The Moral Aspect of War 21 

The North American Review, October, 1899 

The Practical Aspect of War . . * * SS 

National Review, June, 1907 

War from the Christian Standpoint ... 95 

A Paper read before the Church Congress, Providence, Rhode 

Island, November 15, rgoo. 
By Alfred T. Mahan, U. S. N. 

The Capture of Private Property at Sea , 115 

The Nineteenth Century and After, June, 1907 
By Julian S. Corbett 

The Hague Conference of 1907, and the Ques- 
tion OF Immunity for Belligerent Mer- 
chant Shipping 155 

National Review, July, 1907 

By Alfred T, Mahan, U. S. N, 



THE POWER THAT MAKES FOR PEACE 



SOME NEGLECTED ASPECTS 
OF WAR 



THE POWER THAT MAKES FOR PEACE 
By Henry S. Pritchett 

The Atlantic Monthly^ July^ 1907 

FEW movements of the last half century have 
commended themselves more to thoughtful 
men than the present organized effort for the estab- 
lishment of the principle of international arbi- 
tration, and through this the securing of a world 
peace. 

The last decade in the history of the peace 
movement is its best. The establishment of the 
Hague Tribunal, the gift of Mr. Carnegie for a 
fitting building for its meetings, and, above all, the 
focusing of international attention upon the feasi- 
bility of and necessity for international arbitration, 
have marked real progress in the practical solution 



4 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

of the problem of world peace. Every friend of 
humanity must feel encouraged at these steps, and 
must have had his faith quickened for the work 
of the future. That that work shall be a real one ; 
that it shall lead not merely to international 
gatherings, but to international agreements; that 
it may make war not only less horrible, but less 
frequent; that it may bring about a common 
understanding under which questions of dispute 
may be adjudicated by reason, not by force ; that 
it may create a public opinion that shall prove a 
powerful factor in restraining nations from war; 
all these things we may reasonably hope for. 
The movement will hasten them in just such 
measure as it is led wisely, sanely, effectively. 

Any such movement, which has to do with the 
larger relations of mankind and which touches 
fundamental human tendencies and qualities, is 
likely to pass through a period of progress followed 
by a period of depression. It is likely to receive 
strength from unexpected sources and to be weak- 
ened by unexpected defections. It is sure to 
suffer from the lack of knowledge on the part of 
those who oppose it; and it is equally sure to 
suffer from the zeal of its own friends, who expect 
more of an organized movement than any organi- 



The Power That Makes for Peace 5 

zation can accomplish. The history of the present- 
day peace movement is in some respects the ana- 
logue of the history of the anti-slavery agitation 
of a century ago. The movement against slavery 
appealed, as does the movement against mili- 
tarism, to the higher moral instincts and inspira- 
tions of men. The men of the nineteenth century 
saw clearly the vast evils of slavery, as the men 
of the twentieth see clearly the evils of war and 
of militarism. In proportion as one appreciates 
such burdens to the social order, one is tempted 
to be influenced by his emotions and to find him- 
self stirred with indignation at a condition of affairs 
which he seeks at once to remedy. It is at such 
times that one is led to overestimate the power of 
an organization and to assume that it can take 
the place of the deeper underlying human educa- 
tion which alone can deal with such conditions. 
It is at such times that men are prone to become 
the partisans rather than the advocates of a cause, 
and to lose their perspective of social forces 
and of human nature. The advocate of peace 
is likely to be a real force in the progress of the 
movement for world peace ; the partisan of peace 
has an attitude of mind likely to injure rather than 
to help the cause he supports. The man who is 



6 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

so eager for world peace that he is ready to fight 
for it has forgotten for the moment the long history 
of our race and its rise from savagery to civiliza- 
tion. 

As one profoundly interested in this movement, 
I venture to call attention to certain fundamental 
human qualities which must inevitably be reck- 
oned with in any such movement, and to point out 
at the same time certain directions in which our 
neglect of these considerations may lead us to 
hinder rather than to further our cause. 

When we look back over the history of our race, 
so far as we know it, it seems clear that man is 
fundamentally a fighting animal. The fact that 
he is a fighting animal is perhaps the most impor- 
tant element in his evolution, and has had as much 
to do as any other quality with the slow process 
of improvement which has made the world of 
to-day out of the world of fifty thousand years ago. 
The whole process of civilization has been a 
development out of a life of continuous fighting 
and toward a life of comparative peace. 

Just what this power is which has brought men 
out of a life of warfare into a life of comparative 
peace is a question about which men differ. Some 
will answer vaguely that the power is a combi- 



The Power That Makes for Peace 7 

nation of forces which have evolved the human 
race; some call it religion; and many have be- 
lieved during the last two thousand years that it 
is Christianity. But however our notions may 
differ as to what the power may be, there is no 
difference as to the process. We know that the 
process by which men have passed from a life 
of warfare to a life of peace is nothing other than 
the slow and sure process of the education of the 
minds and of the consciences of men, and we 
know further that this slow and sure process is 
the only one that will ever bring a true world 
peace. There are no short cuts by which men 
may be made good, or by which men may be made 
peaceful, though good men have sought in all 
ages to find such. If the world could have been 
saved by an organization, it would have been 
saved a thousand years ago by the Christian 
church ; if it could have been saved by legislative 
enactment, it would have been saved centuries 
ago by the parliaments of the nations; if it could 
have been saved by administrative process, it 
would have been saved by the rulers who have 
governed it for two thousand years. There is 
no such royal road to peace. The world, if it is 
ever to know universal peace, will find it only 



8 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

through that same slow process by which we have 
attained our present civihzation; and however 
important peace congresses and international 
agreements and international tribunals may be, 
let us not lose our perspective of their true place 
in this process. They are not the agencies which 
are to do the real work, but are only the methods 
by which public opinion is to be influenced and 
quickened. 

Nor can one afford to forget, when he seeks to 
serve the cause of world peace, the elemental influ- 
ences to which our human nature responds and 
the fundamental virtues to which they give rise. 
To bring about peace we cannot make human 
nature over; we can hope only to discipline and 
to refine it. That fighting spirit of our race, the 
spirit that is in every man, the spirit that has been 
ingrained in us by hundreds of thousands of years 
of our race life, and that has played so great a 
part in our evolution from barbarism to civili- 
zation, is not wholly bad. It grew on the one side 
out of aggressiveness, selfishness, suspicion; but 
on the other side its roots went deep into the nobler 
qualities of bravery, courage, loyalty, patriotism. 
The whole process of civilization has been an 
effort not to eradicate this spirit, but to discipline 



The Power That Makes for Peace g 

and refine it; to retain the old-time virtues while 
getting rid of the old-time vices. The man of the 
highest civilization to-day is no less a fighter than 
his savage ancestor of ten thousand years ago 
but he holds the spirit of the fighter under the 
discipline of self-control and of the law. We 
could not, if we would, banish from our social and 
political life the things which appeal to this fight- 
ing spirit, because they pervade our whole civili- 
zation, our literature, our language, our religion. 
When a band of scholars rises to its feet and 
breaks into that martial song, " Onward, Christian 
Soldiers," it is the appeal to this old-time inbred 
human spirit which stirs them, as well as the 
motive of Christian duty and of Christian service. 
For this reason it seems to me unwise in the 
advocate of world peace to seek to banish such 
patriotic sentiments and influences. Such a criti- 
cism as has been made of the Jamestown Exposi- 
tion, on account of the naval display which is to 
be had in connection with it, seems to me, on the 
whole, to hinder, not to further the cause of uni- 
versal peace. To make such a criticism and to 
urge the banishment from our everyday life of all 
those things which appeal to the fighting spirit 
of man is to forget the long story of human devel- 



lo Some Neglected Aspects of War 

opment. It is to confuse symptoms with causes. 
For it is not soldiers and cannon and ships which 
make national quarrels, but the injustice, the 
greed, the selfishness, the ambitions, and above 
all the ignorance of man, which sets armies and 
navies to their dreadful work. If we could to- 
morrow destroy every war vessel and dissolve 
every army, it would not insure universal peace, 
any more than the destruction of all the liquor 
in the world would bring about universal temper- 
ance. We serve best the cause of peace when we 
recognize frankly the process out of which we 
have come, when we deal clear-eyed with the 
universal human spirit and the elemental human 
tendencies, and when we lend ourselves to that 
process which the power that makes for righteous- 
ness has given us, the process of the education 
of the great mass of mankind. It is when we take 
a step in that slow evolution of education that we 
take a real step toward a true world of peace. 
A nation helps the cause of peace when it takes 
official part in a world's congress for this cause, 
but it works immeasurably more efficiently when 
it deals justly and fairly with its own citizens and 
with other nations. A university does well to 
send its representatives to a peace congress, but 



The Power That Makes for Peace n 

it does a real work for peace when it sends into 
the world men who deal rightly with their fellow- 
men. A corporation helps the cause of peace 
best when it deals fairly, not only with its own 
interests but with the interests of its employees. 
A labor union aids the cause of peace most effect- 
ively when it develops a policy of unselfishness 
and fairness instead of a policy of selfishness and 
greed. A soldier stands for peace when he uses 
the military power justly, fairly, mercifully. We 
bring a world peace nearer when we so educate 
the individual man as to bring about a common 
understanding between men and between nations. 
The first step to individual agreement is individual 
confidence ; the first step to international peace is 
international confidence and respect for the com- 
mon motives of nations. And the first step in 
common confidence and respect is common knowl- 
edge and acquaintance. Ignorance of the motives, 
of the ideals, of the purposes of those with whom 
we have to do is the author, not only of armies 
and navies, but of wars and battles. 

The old-time savage Hfe was a life of isolation. 
Each man held a suspicion and dread of his 
neighbor which was in proportion to his ignorance 
of his neighbor's purposes and ideals. The first 



12 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

steps of civilization were those which led to asso- 
ciation and acquaintance; and these must be the 
first steps in an international peace which is to be 
lasting. Intellectual and social isolation has bred 
more wars than hatred and revenge. 

Among the many causes of our Civil War, one 
which is seldom thought of was the intellectual 
and pohtical isolation of the Southern States. 
The Southern leaders sincerely believed in i860 
that they could organize a nation which could go 
on perpetuating slavery in disregard of the public 
opinion of the rest of the world. Had these leaders 
been men in touch with the world's thoughts and 
the world's ideals they would have known that 
slavery was already dead, that no civilized nation 
could long maintain it, that the world was already 
ripe for its abandonment; and they themselves 
realized before the war was half over that, even 
if the Southern Confederacy were established, 
slavery was gone. A nation pays a fearful price 
for intellectual and moral isolation, a price paid 
down in centuries of suffering and in the blood 
of unnumbered battlefields. 

However deeply we may regret war, however 
sincerely we may desire peace, there are probably 
few men who do not sincerely believe that for 



The Power That Makes for Peace 13 

years to come our nation, in common with other 
nations, must maintain an army and navy, what- 
ever limitations may be placed on their develop- 
ment. 

So long as an army and a navy are to be main- 
tained, it is important that the men who make 
up the military service shall be drawn from citizens 
of the highest character. If we are to place in 
the hands of men military power, it is above all 
essential that they shall be men of high intelligence 
and of high ideals. 

There has grown up in Europe, and in America 
in recent years, amongst those active in the cause 
of international peace, a disposition to discredit 
and to belittle the military service ; a tendency to 
discourage by all means young men of high char- 
acter from entering the service of the army and 
of the navy. 

In the light of our history and of our development 
this effort also seems to me against the interest of 
the peace movement, not in favor of it. No citizen 
or group of citizens can belittle the service of one's 
country in any direction without striking a blow 
at the same time at the deeper human qualities 
of loyalty and patriotism which lie back of all 
service and of all devotion. 



14 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

No man who will look carefully into the work 
of the army or the navy can fail to realize that a 
career in either branch of our military service 
is one to which any man may give himself with the 
fullest devotion and with the highest ideals. 
Americans, as a rule, know little about the actual 
work of either of these services, and few realize 
that when a man enters the service of the army 
or the navy, whether as officer or as enlisted 
man, he enters a great school, a school in which 
is taught not only the discipline of self-restraint, 
of cleanliness, of devotion to duty, but also the 
elements of an education. An enlisted man who 
enters a regiment of the army, barely able to read 
and write, comes out, if he be a man of ambition 
and industry, at the end of three years, in posses- 
sion of the fundamentals of an English education. 
His officer stands to him not only in the relation 
of military director, but in the relation also of a 
teacher and of a friend. There is no career open 
to an American boy, unless it be that of a teacher, 
which offers a larger opportunity to minister to 
the service of men than that of the army or navy 
officer. 

There are, to be sure, in both services men who 
do not take their profession seriously; there are 



The Power That Makes for Peace 15 

men who are lazy and who are indifferent; but 
the great body of officers are earnest, hard- 
working, patriotic men. There is no life to which 
an American boy can give himself better worth his 
metal than that which he can find in either of these 
services. To belittle this life, to minimize its 
value, to seek to place it under social condemna- 
tion, is to strike a blow, not for peace but against 
that inbred spirit which stands for courage and 
loyalty and patriotism. For one cannot destroy 
the old-time fighting spirit of the race without 
weakening at the same time these elemental 
human virtues. 

Of the truth of this statement the world has 
had an object lesson so striking that he who runs 
may read. For more than twenty-five centuries 
the Chinese have developed under a philosophy 
which led them to discredit in every way the sol- 
dier's life and to exalt in comparison with it the life 
of commerce and of peace. In this matter the 
philosophy of Confucius has been accepted by that 
nation with a completeness and sincerity seldom 
shown in the history of any religious or philosoph- 
ical evolution. The Chinese have become essen- 
tially a peaceful people. No nation needs to 
fear their aggressions. Amongst them the pro- 



1 6 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

fession of the soldier has come to be considered 
the lowest of all callings. 

The result of centuries of education in this 
philosophy is that China is at the mercy of all 
the so-called Christian nations; but, what is 
more serious, the process of eradicating the old 
fighting spirit has not only banished the worse 
qualities of that spirit, but it has also rooted out 
the old-time human virtues of loyalty and patriot- 
ism. There are those who have read in the teach- 
ings of Jesus Christ a similar lesson. *^ Blessed 
are the peace-makers " has been taken to mean 
" blessed are the peaceful.'' As a matter of fact, 
one can scarcely find a greater contrast than is 
shown in this respect between the philosophy of 
Jesus Christ and the philosophy of Confucius. 
Christ lived at a time when the burdens and 
horrors of war were felt in every hamlet and in 
every home. The military power held the social 
order at its mercy. Yet He never sought to array 
society against the soldier or the soldier's calling. 
On the other hand, looking beneath the surface 
of things, He dealt with the causes which made 
men and nations selfish and cruel and warlike, 
and to the soldier He said, " Live your life as a 
soldier honestly, justly, mercifully," knowing full 



The Power That Makes for Peace 17 

well that he who lived the soldier^s life in this 
spirit served the cause of peace as truly as he who 
advocated peace upon the housetops. 

It is in view, too, of this age-long racial history 
that I cannot make myself believe that the artificial 
remedies which have been advocated as an antidote 
for war have serious significance. The idea that 
war can be made so dangerous that men will not 
engage in it, or that peace can be arbitrarily 
brought in by force, fails alike to take account of 
our racial history and of the underlying influences 
which move men. Such remedies have the same 
significance in the social order that the Keeley 
cure for drunkenness has in medicine. 

The nation which should act on such a theory 
might well expect to share the experience of a 
doughty Confederate colonel who, after the Civil 
War, returned with his war-worn and defeated 
veterans to his native village and was twitted on 
the fact that four years earlier he had boasted 
that he and his men could lick the Yankees with 
popguns. "So we could,'' answered the colonel 
stoutly, " but the Yankees wouldn't fight that 
way." 

The truth is, there are no such short cuts to 
peace. Dreadful as war is, there are some things 



i8 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

even worse. Under certain circumstances a nation 
will fight if it have left in it a spark of the elemental 
human virtue. And the remedy for such condi- 
tions lies far back of any influences which force 
or arbitrary restrictions can create. 

And so I venture, in this day of enthusiasm for 
organization, to recall the fact that the cause of 
universal peace which we advocate is really no new 
thing, that it is nothing other than the cause of 
universal education; not necessarily the educa- 
tion of the school, but the education which 
makes man understand man, which makes 
state understand state, and which brings nations 
into relations of confidence and trust with other 
nations. Let us by all means further by these 
formal gatherings the cause of international organi- 
zation, but let us not lose our perspective with 
respect to the organization, and the results which 
it may accomplish. And let us by all means not 
forget that the process which is in the end to bring 
about the result is, after all, the same slow process 
which has brought us up from savagery to the 
civilization of our day. That process we may 
hasten, but it cannot be done by disregarding our 
age-long racial history or our inbred human 
nature. 



The Power That Makes jor Peace 19 

The beginning of the peace movement Hes in 
the promotion of common confidence and better 
understanding, not in the effort to belittle and to 
ostracize any class of citizens. The largest result 
which it may hope to gain is by focusing public 
attention, by creating a better understanding, by 
replacing ignorance with knowledge, by creating 
an international conscience. The real work will 
always remain the work of educating the con- 
sciences and the minds of the great mass of man- 
kind. 

It is through this slow process that we may 
venture to hope that the time will come when 
international differences shall be in the keeping 
of international tribunals ; and it is by the further- 
ing of this sure process that the peace advocates 
of to-day may hope to bring about a movement 
which shall have as its consummation the deliver- 
ance of the world from the burden and horror 
of war. The cause of organized peace is worthy 
of our race and of its highest representatives. 
Let us hope that they may go forward in this 
effort, not only with true enthusiasm, but also 
with true judgment; that they may preserve a 
fair perspective, realizing that the causes of war 
lie far back of armies and navies, in the fundamen- 



20 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

tal qualities of human nature; and that such 
organized effort will have force and value in 
proportion as those who direct it preserve a true 
vision and a serene judgment. 



n 

THE PEACE CONFERENCE AND THE 
MORAL ASPECT OF WAR 



THE PEACE CONFERENCE AND THE 
MORAL ASPECT OF WAR 

By Alfred T. Mahan 

North American Review^ October^ 1899. 

TO determine the consequences of an his- 
torical episode, such as the recent ' Peace 
Conference at The Hague, is not a matter for 
prophecy, but for experience, which alone can 
decide what positive issues, for good or for ill, 
shall hereafter trace their source to this beginning. 
The most that the present can do is to take note 
of the point so far reached, and of apparent 
tendencies manifested; to seek for the latter a 
right direction; to guide, where it can, currents 
of general thought, the outcome of which will 
be beneficial or injurious, according as their 
course is governed by a just appreciation of funda- 
mental truths. 
The calling of the Conference of The Hague 

* The references throughout this article are to the first of the 
Hague Conferences in 1899. 



24 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

originated in an avowed desire to obtain relief 
from immediate economical burdens, by the adop- 
tion of some agreement to restrict the preparations 
for war, and the consequent expense involved in 
national armaments; but before its meeting the 
hope of disarmament had fallen into the back- 
ground, the vacant place being taken by the 
project of abating the remoter evils of recurrent 
warfare, by giving a further impulse, and a more 
clearly defined application, to the principle of 
Arbitration, which thenceforth assumed pre-emi- 
nence in the councils of the Conference. This may 
be considered the point at which we have arrived. 
The assembled representatives of many nations, 
including all the greatest upon the earth, have 
decided that it is to arbitration men must look 
for relief, rather than to partial disarmament, 
or even to an arrest in the progress of prepara- 
tions for war. Of the beneficence of the practice 
of arbitration, of the wisdom of substituting it, 
when possible, for the appeal to arms, with all 
the misery therefrom resulting, there can be no 
doubt ; but it will be expected that in its applica- 
tion, and in its attempted development, the 
tendencies of the day, both good and bad, will 
make themselves felt. If, on the one hand, there 



The Moral Aspect of War 25 

is solid ground for rejoicing, in the growing inclina- 
tion to resort first to an impartial arbiter, if such 
can be found, when occasion for collision arises, 
there is, on the other hand, cause for serious 
reflection, when this most humane impulse is seen 
to favor methods, which by compulsion shall 
vitally impair the moral freedom, and the conse- 
quent moral responsibility, which are the distin- 
guishing glory of the rational man, and of the 
sovereign state. 

One of the most unfortunate characteristics 
of our present age is the disposition to impose 
by legislative enactment — that is, by external 
compulsion — restrictions of a moral character, 
which are either fundamentally unjust, or at least 
do not carry with them the moral sense of the 
community, as a whole. It is not religious faith 
alone that in the past has sought to propagate 
itself by force of law, which ultimately is force of 
physical coercion. If the religious liberty of 
the individual has been at last won, as we hope 
forever, it is sufficiently notorious that the pro- 
pensity of majorities to control the freedom of 
minorities, in matters of disputed right and wrong, 
still exists, as certain and as tyrannical as ever was 
the will of Philip II. that there should be no 



26 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

heretic within his dominion. Many cannot so 
much as comprehend the thought of an Enghsh 
bishop, that it was better to see England free than 
England sober. 

In matters internal to a state, the bare existence 
of a law imposes an obligation upon the individual 
citizen, whatever his personal conviction of its 
rightfulness or its wisdom. Yet is such obligation 
not absolute. The primary duty, attested alike 
by the law and the gospel, is submission. The 
presumption is in favor of the law; and if there 
lie against it just cause for accusation, on the score 
either of justice or of expediency, the interests of 
the Commonwealth and the precepts of religion 
alike demand that opposition shall be conducted 
according to the methods, and within the limits, 
which the law of the land itself prescribes. But 
it may be — it has been, and yet again may be — 
that the law, however regular in its enactment, 
and therefore unquestionable on the score of 
formal authority, either outrages fundamental 
political right, or violates the moral dictates of the 
individual conscience. Of the former may be 
cited as an instance the Stamp Act, perfectly 
regular as regarded statutory validity, which 
kindled the flame of revolution in America. Of 



The Moral Aspect of War 27 

the second, the Fugitive Slave Law, within the 
memory of many yet living, is a conspicuous 
illustration. Under such conditions, the moral 
right of resistance is conceded — nay, is affirmed 
and emphasized — by the moral consciousness of 
the races from which the most part of the American 
people have their origin, and to which, almost 
wholly, we owe our political and religious tradi- 
tions. Such resistance may be passive, accepting 
meekly the penalty for disobedience, as the martyr 
who for conscience' sake refused the political 
requirement of sacrificing to the image of the 
Caesar; or it may be active and violent, as when 
our forefathers repelled taxation without repre- 
sentation ; or when men and women, of a genera- 
tion not yet wholly passed away, refused to violate 
their consciences by acquiescing in the return of a 
slave to his bondage, resorting to evasion or to 
violence, according to their conditions or tempera- 
ments, but in every case deriving the sanction for 
their unlawful action from the mandate of their 
personal conscience. 

And let it be carefully kept in mind that it is 
not the absolute right or wrong of the particular 
act, as seen in the clearer light of a later day, 
that justified men, whether in the particular 



28 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

instances cited, or in other noteworthy incidents 
in the long series of steps by which the EngHsh- 
speaking races have ascended to their present 
pohtical development. It is not the demonstrable 
rightfulness of a particular action, as seen in the 
dispassionate light of the arbiter, posterity, that 
has chiefly constituted the merit of the individual 
rebel against the law in which he beheld iniquity ; 
the saving salt, which has preserved the health- 
fulness of the body politic, has been the fidelity 
to Conscience, to the faithful, if passionate, arbiter 
of the moment, whose glorious predominance in 
the individual, or in the nation, gives a better assur- 
ance of the highest life than does the clearest intel- 
lectual perception of the rightfulness, or of the 
expediency, of a particular course. One may 
now see, or think that he sees, as does the writer, 
with Lincoln, that if slavery is not wrong, nothing 
is wrong. It was not so clear half a century ago ; 
and while no honor is too great for those early 
heroes, who for this sublime conviction withstood 
obloquy and persecution, legal and illegal, it 
should be never forgotten that the then slave 
States, in their resolute determination to maintain 
by arms, if need be, and against superior force, 
that which they beheved to be their constitutional 



The Moral Aspect of War 29 

political right, made no small contribution to 
the record of fidelity to conscience and to duty, 
which is the highest title of a nation to honor. 
Be it by action or be it by submission, by action 
positive or by action negative, whatsoever is not 
of faith — of conviction — is sin. 

The just and necessary exaltation of law, as 
the guarantee of true liberty, with the consequent 
accepted submission of the individual to it, and 
the recognized presumption in favor of such sub- 
mission, have tended to bhnd us to the fact that 
the individual, in our highest consciousness, 
has never surrendered his moral freedom, — his 
independence of conscience. No human law 
overbears that supreme appeal, which carries the 
matter from the tribunal of man into the presence 
of God; nor can human law be pleaded at this 
bar as the excuse for a violation of conscience. It 
is a dangerous doctrine, doubtless, to preach that 
there may be a *^ higher law " than obedience 
to law; but truth is not to be rejected because 
dangerous, and the time is not long past when the 
phrase voiced a conviction, the forcible assertion 
of which brought slavery to an end forever. 

The resort to arms by a nation, when right 
cannot otherwise be enforced, corresponds, or 



30 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

should correspond, precisely to the acts of the 
individual man which have been cited; for the 
old conception of an appeal to the Almighty, 
resembling in principle the mediaeval trial by 
battle, is at best but a partial view of the truth, 
seen from one side only. However the result may 
afterwards be interpreted as indicative of the 
justice of a cause, — an interpretation always 
questionable, — a state, when it goes to war, 
should do so not to test the rightfulness of its 
claims, but because, being convinced in its con- 
science of that rightfulness, no other means of 
overcoming evil remains. 

Nations, like men, have a conscience. Like 
men, too, the light of conscience is in nations 
often clouded, or misguided, by passion or by 
interest. But what of that ? Does a man discard 
his allegiance to conscience because he knows 
that, itself in harmony with right, its message to 
him is perplexed and obscured by his own infirm- 
ities? Not so. Fidelity to conscience implies 
not only obedience to its dictates, but earnest 
heart-searching, the use of every means, to ascer- 
tain its true command; yet withal, whatever the 
mistrust of the message, the supremacy of the con- 
science is not impeached. When it is recognized 



The Moral Aspect of War 31 

that its final word is spoken, nothing remains but 
obedience. Even if mistaken, the moral wrong 
of acting against conviction works a deeper injury 
to the man, and to his kind, than can the merely 
material disasters that may follow upon obedience. 
Even the material evils of war are less than the 
moral evil of compliance with wrong. 

" Yes, my friend," replied to me a foreign 
diplomatist to whom I was saying some such 
things, " but remember that only a few years ago 
the conscience of your people was pressing you 
into war with Great Britain in the Venezuelan 
question." " Admitting," I rephed, " that the 
first national impulse, the first movement of the 
conscience, if you like, was mistaken, — which 
is at least open to argument, — it remains that 
there was no war; time for deliberation was taken, 
and more than that can be asked of no conscience, 
national or personal. But, further, had the final 
decision of conscience been that just cause for 
war existed, no evil that war brings could equal 
the moral declension which a nation inflicts upon 
itself, and upon mankind, by deliberate acquies- 
cence in wrong, which it recognizes and which it 
may right." Nor is this conclusion vitiated by 
the fact that war is made at times upon mistaken 



32 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

conviction. It is not the accuracy of the decision, 
but the faithfulness to conviction, that constitutes 
the moral worth of an action, national or indi- 
vidual. 

The general consciousness of this truth is 
witnessed by a common phrase, which excludes 
from suggested schemes of arbitration all questions 
which involve " national honor or vital interests.'* 
No one thing struck me more forcibly during the 
Conference at The Hague than the exception taken 
and expressed, although in a very few quarters, 
to the word " honor," in this connection. There 
is for this good reason; for the word, admirable 
in itself and if rightly understood, has lost mate- 
rially in the clearness of its image and superscrip- 
tion, by much handling and by some misapplica- 
tion. Honor does not forbid a nation to acknowl- 
edge that it is wrong, or to recede from a step 
which it has taken through wrong motives or 
mistaken reasons; yet it has at times been so 
thought, to the grievous injury of the conception 
of honor. It is not honor, necessarily, but sound 
policy, which prescribes that peace with a semi- 
civihzed foe should not be made after a defeat; 
but, however justifiable the policy, the word 
** honor " is defaced by thus misapplying it. 



The Moral Aspect of War ^^ 

The varying fortunes, the ups and downs of 
the idea of arbitration at the Conference of The 
Hague, as far as my inteUigence could follow them, 
produced in me two principal conclusions, which 
so far confirmed my previous points of view that 
I think I may now fairly claim for them that they 
have ripened into opinions, between which word, 
and the cruder, looser views received passively 
as impressions, I have been ever careful to mark 
a distinction. In the first place, compulsory 
arbitration stands at present no chance of general 
acceptance. There is but one way as yet in 
which arbitration can be - compulsory ; for the 
dream of some advanced thinkers, of an Interna- 
tional Army, charged with imposing the decrees 
of an International Tribunal upon a recalcitrant 
state, may be dismissed as being outside of practical 
international politics, until at least the nations are 
ready for the intermediate step of moral compul- 
sion, imposed by a self- assumed obligation — by a 
promise. In the general understanding, compulsory 
arbitration as yet means only the moral compulsion 
of a pledge, taken beforehand, and more or less 
comprehensive, to submit to arbitration questions 
which rest still in the unknown future; the very 
terms of which therefore cannot be foreseen, Al- 



34 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

though there is a certain active current of agitation 
in favor of such stipulations, there is no general dis- 
position of governments to accede, except under 
very narrow and precise limitations, and in ques- 
tions of less than secondary importance.^ 

Secondly, there appears to be, on the other 
hand, a much greater disposition than formerly 
to entertain favorably the idea of arbitration, as a 
means to be in all cases considered, and where 
possible to be adopted, in order to solve peaceably 
difficulties which threaten peace. In short, the 
consciences of the nations are awake to the wicked- 
ness of unnecessary war, and are disposed, as a 
general rule, to seek first, and where admissible, 
the counterpoise of an impartial judge, where such 
can be found, to correct the bias of national self- 
will; but there is an absolute indisposition, an 
instinctive revolt, against signing away, before- 
hand, the national conscience, by a promise that 
any other arbiter than itself shall be accepted in 
questions of the future, the import of which 
cannot yet be discerned. Of this feeling the vague 
and somewhat clumsy phrase, " national honor 

* The attempt at the recent Second Conference of the Hague 
to frame a list of subjects to be of obligatory arbitration, and 
the excessively colorless character of the subjects admitted, will 
be fresh in the memory of those who have followed the pro- 
ceedings. 



The Moral Aspect of War 35 

and vital interests," has in the past been the ex- 
pression; for its very indeterminateness reserved 
to conscience in every case the decision, — " May 
another judge for me here, or must I be bound by 
my own sense of right? " 

Under these circumstances, and having reached 
so momentous a stage in progress as is indicated 
by the very caUing together of a world conference 
for the better assuring of peace, may it not be 
well for us to pause a moment and take full account 
of the idea. Arbitration, on the right hand and on 
the left ? Noble and beneficent in its true outlines, 
it too may share, may even now be sharing, the 
liability of the loftiest conceptions to degenerate 
into catchwords, or into cant. " Liberty, what 
crimes have been wrought in thy name ! " and 
does not religion share the same reproach, and 
conscience also? Yet will we not away with 
any of the three. 

The conviction of a nation is the conviction 
of the mass of the individuals thereof, and each 
individual has therefore a personal responsibility 
for the opinion he holds on a question of great 
national, or international, moment. Let us look, 
each of us, — and especially each of us who fears 
God, — into his own inner heart, and ask himself 



36 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

how far, in his personal life, he is prepared to 
accept arbitration. Is it not so that the reply 
must be, " In doubtful questions of moment, 
wherever I possibly can, knowing my necessary, 
inevitable proneness to one-sided views, I will seek 
an impartial adviser, that my bias may be cor- 
rected ; but when that has been done, when I have 
sought what aid I can, if conscience still commands, 
I must obey it. From that duty, burdensome 
though it may be, no man can relieve me. Con- 
science, diligently consulted, is to the man the 
voice of God ; between God and the man no other 
arbiter comes." And if this be so, a pledge 
beforehand is impossible. I cannot bind myself 
for a future of which I as yet know nothing, to 
abide by the decision of any other judge than 
my own conscience. Much humor — less wit — 
has been expended upon the Emperor of Ger- 
many's supposed carefulness to reject arbitration 
because an infringement of his divine rights; a 
phrase which may well be no more than a blunt 
expression of the sense that no third party can 
relieve a man from the obligations of the position 
to which he is called by God, and that for the 
duties of that position the man can confidently 
expect divine guidance and help. Be that as it 



The Moral Aspect of War 37 

may, the divine right of conscience will, among 
Americans, receive rare challenge. 

It has been urged, however, that a higher 
organization of the nations, the provision of a 
supreme tribunal issuing and enforcing judgments, 
settling thereby quarrels and disputed rights, 
would produce for the nations of the earth a 
condition analogous to that of the individual 
citizen of the state, who no longer defends his own 
cause, nor is bound in conscience to maintain his 
own sense of right, when the law decides against 
him. The conception is not novel, not even 
modern; something much like it was put forth 
centuries ago by the Papacy concerning its own 
functions. It contains two fallacies. First, the 
submission of the individual citizen is to force, 
to the constitution of which he personally contrib- 
utes little, save his individual and general assent. 
To an unjust law he submits under protest, 
doubtless often silent ; but he submits, not because 
he consents to the wrong, whether to himself 
personally or to others, but because he cannot 
help it. This will perhaps be denied, with the 
assertion that willing, intelligent submission to 
law, even when unjust, is yielded by most for the 
general good. One has, however, only to consider 



38 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

the disposition of the average man to evade pay- 
ment of taxes, to recognize how far force daily 
enters into the maintenance and execution of law. 
Nations, on the contrary, since no force exists, 
or without their volition can exist, to compel them 
to accept the institution of an authority superior 
to their own conscience, yield a willing acquies- 
cence to wrong, when they so yield in obedience 
to an external authority imposed by themselves. 
The matter is not helped by the fact of a previous 
promise to accept such decisions. The viTong- 
doing of an individual, in consequence of an ante- 
cedent promise, does not relieve the conscience 
thus rashly fettered. The ancient warning still 
stands, " Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh 
to sin." For the individual or the nation, arbi- 
tration is not possible where the decision may 
violate conscience; it therefore can be accepted 
only when it is known that interest merely, not 
duty, will be affected by the judgment, and such 
knowledge cannot exist antecedent to the difficulty 
arising. 

There is a further — a second — fallacy in 
the supposed analogy between the submission of 
individuals to law, and the advocated submission 
of states to a central tribunal. The law of the 



The Moral Aspect of War 39 

state, overwhelming as is its power relatively to 
that of the individual citizen, can neither bind nor 
loose in matters pertaining to the conscience. 
Still less can any tribunal, however solemnly 
constituted, liberate a state from its obligation 
to do right; still less, I say, because the state 
retains, what the individual has in great part lost, 
the power to maintain what it believes to be right. 
Many considerations may make it more right — 
I do not say more expedient — for a man or for a 
nation, to submit to, or to acquiesce in, wrong than 
to resist; but in such cases it is conscience still 
that decides where the balance of justice turns 
distinctly to the side of wrong. It is, I presume, 
universally admitted, that occasions may arise 
where conscience not only justifies, but compels, 
resistance to law; whether it be the Christian 
citizen refusing to sacrifice, or the free citizen to 
subject himself to unconstitutional taxation, or 
to become the instrument of returning the slave 
to his master. So also for the Christian state. 
Existing wrong may have to be allowed, lest a 
greater wrong be done. Conscience only can 
decide ; and for that very reason conscience must 
be kept free, that it may decide according to its 
sense of right, when the case is presented. 



40 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

There is, therefore, the very serious considera- 
tion attendant upon what is loosely styled " com- 
pulsory" arbitration, — arbitration stipulated, that 
is, in advance of a question originating, or of its 
conditions being appreciated, — that a state may 
thereby do that which a citizen as towards the 
state does not do; namely, may voluntarily 
assume a moral obligation to do, or to allow, 
wrong. And it must be remembered, also, that 
many of the difficulties which arise among states 
involve considerations distinctly beyond and higher 
than law as international law now exists ; whereat 
the advocated Permanent Tribunal, to which the 
ultra-organizers look, to take cognizance of all 
cases, must perforce be governed by law as it 
exists. It is not, in fact, to be supposed that 
nations will submit themselves to a tribunal, the 
general principles of which have not been crystal- 
lized into a code of some sort. 

A concrete instance, however, is always more 
comprehensible and instructive than a general 
discussion. Let us therefore take the incidents 
and conditions which preceded our recent war 
with Spain. The facts, as seen by us, may, I 
apprehend, be fairly stated as follows: In the 
island of Cuba, a powerful military force, — gov- 



The Moral Aspect of War 41 

ernment it scarcely could be called, — foreign to 
the island, was holding a small portion of it in 
enforced subjection, and was endeavoring, unsuc- 
cessfully, to reduce the remainder. In pursuance 
of this attempt, measures were adopted that 
inflicted iramense misery and death upon great 
numbers of the population. Such suffering is 
indeed attendant upon war ; but it may be stated 
as a fundamental principle of civilized warfare 
that useless suffering is condemned, and it had 
become apparent to military eyes that Spain could 
not subdue the island, nor restore orderly condi- 
tions. The suffering was terrible, and was un- 
availing. 

Under such circumstances, does any moral 
obligation He upon a powerful neighboring state? 
Or, more exactly, if there is borne in upon the 
moral consciousness of a mighty people that such 
an afflicted community as that of Cuba at their 
doors is like Lazarus at the gate of the rich man, 
and that the duty of stopping the evil rests upon 
them, what is to be done with such a case of 
conscience? Could the decision of another, 
whether nation or court, excuse our nation from 
the ultimate responsibihty of its own decision? 
But, granting that it might have proved expedient 



42 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

to call in other judges, when we had full knowledge 
of the circumstances, what would have been our 
dilemma if, conscience commanding one course, 
we had found ourselves antecedently bound to 
abide by the conclusions of another arbiter ? For 
let us not deceive ourselves. Absolutely justi- 
fiable, nay, imperative, as most Americans believe 
our action to have been, when tried at the bar of 
conscience, no arbitral court, acceptable to the two 
nations, would have decided as our own conscience 
did. A European diplomatist of distinguished 
reputation, of a small nation likeliest to be un- 
biassed, so said to me personally, and it is known 
that more than one of our own ablest international 
lawyers held that we were acting in defiance of 
international law as it now exists ; just as the men 
who resisted the Fugitive Slave Law acted in 
defiance of the statute law of the land. Decision 
must have gone against us, so these men think, 
on the legal merits of the^ case. Of the moral 
question the arbiter could take no account : it is 
not there, indeed, the moral questions must find 
their solution, but in the court of conscience. 
Referred to arbitration, doubtless the Spanish 
flag would still fly over Cuba. 
There is unquestionably a higher law than 



The Moral Aspect of War 43 

Law, concerning obedience to which no other 
than the man himself, or the state, can give account 
to Him that shall judge. The freedom of the 
conscience may be fettered or signed away by 
him who owes to it allegiance ; yet its supremacy, 
though thus disavowed, cannot be overthrown. 
The Conference at The Hague has facilitated 
future recourse to arbitration, by providing means 
through which, a case arising, a court is more 
easily constituted, and rules governing its proce- 
dure are ready to hand ; but it has refrained from 
any engagements binding states to have recourse 
to the tribunal thus created. The responsibility 
of the state to its own conscience remains unim- 
peached and independent. The progress thus 
made and thus limited is to a halting place, at 
which, whether well chosen or not, the nations 
must perforce stop for a time ; and it will be wise 
to employ that time in considering the bearings, 
alike of that which has been done, and of that 
which has been left undone. 

Our own country has a special need thus care- 
fully to consider the possible consequences of 
arbitration, understood in the sense of an ante- 
cedent pledge to resort to it ; unless under limita- 
tions very carefully hedged. There is an un- 



44 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

doubted popular tendency in direction of such 
arbitration, which would be " compulsory " in 
the highest moral sense, — the compulsion of a 
promise. The world at large, and we especially, 
stand at the opening of a new era, concerning 
whose problems little can be foreseen. Among 
the peoples, there is manifested intense interest 
in the maturing of our national convictions, as 
being, through Asia, new-comers into active 
international life, concerning whose course it is 
impossible to predict; and in many quarters, 
probably in all except Great Britain, the attitude 
toward us is watchful rather than sympathetic. 
The experience of Crete and of Armenia does not 
suggest beneficent results from the arbitration of 
many counsellors; especially if contrasted with 
the more favorable issue when Russia, in 1877, 
acting on her own single initiative, forced by the 
conscience of her people, herself alone struck the 
fetters from Bulgaria; or when we ourselves last 
year, rejecting intermediation, loosed the bonds 
from Cuba, and lifted the yoke from the neck of 
the oppressed. 

It was inevitable that thoughts like these should 
recur frequently to one of the writer's habit of 
thought, when in constant touch with the atmos- 



The Moral Aspect of War 45 

phere that hung around the Conference, although 
the latter was by it but little affected. The poet's 
words, " The Parliament of man, the federation 
of the world,'' were much in men's mouths this 
past summer. There is no denying the beauty 
of the ideal, but there was apparent also a dispo- 
sition, in contemplating it, to contemn the slow 
processes of evolution by which Nature commonly 
attains her ends, and to impose at once, by con- 
vention, the methods that commended themselves 
to the sanguine. Fruit is not best ripened by 
premature plucking, nor can the goal be reached 
by such short cuts. Step by step, in the past, 
man has ascended by means of the sword, and 
his more recent gains, as well as present condi- 
tions, show that the time has not yet come to 
kick down the ladder which has so far served 
him. Three hundred years ago, the people of 
the land in which the Conference was assembled 
wrenched with the sword civil and religious peace, 
and national independence, from the tyranny of 
Spain. Then began the disintegration of her 
empire, and the deliverance of peoples from her 
oppression ; but this was completed only last year, 
and then again by the sword — of the United 
States. 



46 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

In the centuries which have since intervened, 
what has not " justice, with valor armed," when 
confronted by evil in high places, found itself 
compelled to effect by resort to the sword? To 
it was due the birth of the United States, not least 
among the benefits of which was the stern experi- 
ence that has made Great Britain no longer the 
mistress, but the mother, of her dependencies. 
The control, to good from evil, of the devastating 
fire of the French Revolution, and of Napoleon, 
was due to the sword. The long line of illustrious 
names and deeds, of those who bore it not in vain, 
has in our times culminated — if indeed the end 
is even yet nearly reached — in the new birth of 
the United States by the extirpation of human 
slavery, and in the downfall, but yesterday, of 
a colonial empire identified with tyranny. What 
the sword, and it supremely, tempered only by 
the stern demands of justice and of conscience, 
and the loving voice of charity, has done for India 
and for Egypt, is a tale at once too long and too 
well known for repetition here. Peace, indeed, 
is not adequate to all progress ; there are resist- 
ances that can be overcome only by explosion. 
What means less violent than war would in a 
half-year have solved the Caribbean problem. 



The Moral Aspect of War 47 

shattered national ideas deep rooted in the pre- 
possessions of a century, and planted the United 
States in Asia, face to face with the great world 
problem of the immediate future? What but the 
War of 1898 rent the veil which prevented the Eng- 
lish-speaking communities from seeing eye to eye, 
and revealed to each the face of a brother ? Little 
wonder that a war which, with comparatively 
little bloodshed, brought such consequences, was 
followed by the call for a Peace Conference ! 

Power, force, is a faculty of national life; one 
of the talents committed to nations by God. Like 
every other endowment of a complex organization, 
it must be held under control of the enlightened 
intellect and of the upright heart; but no more 
than any other can it be carelessly or lightly 
abjured, without incurring the responsibility of 
one who buries in the earth that which was in- 
trusted to him for use. And this obligation to 
maintain right, by force if need be, while common 
to all states, rests peculiarly upon the greater, in 
proportion to their means. Much is required of 
those to whom much is given. So viewed, the 
ability speedily to put forth the nation's power, by 
adequate organization and other necessary prepa- 
ration, according to the reasonable demands of 



48 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

the nation's intrinsic strength and of its position 
in the world, is one of the clear duties involved 
in the Christian word "watchfulness," — readi- 
ness for the call that may come, whether expect- 
edly or not. Until it is demonstrable that no 
evil exists, or threatens the world, which cannot 
be obviated without recourse to force, the obliga- 
tion to readiness must remain; and, where evil 
is mighty and defiant, the obligation to use force — 
that is, war — arises. Nor is it possible, ante- 
cedently, to bring these conditions and obligations 
under the letter of precise and codified law, to 
be administered by a tribunal. The spirit of 
legalism is marked by blemishes as real as those 
commonly attributed to ^' militarism," and not 
more elevated. The considerations which deter- 
mine good and evil, right and wrong, in crises 
of national life, or of the world's history, are 
questions of equity often too complicated for 
decision upon mere rules, or even upon principles, 
of law, international or other. The instances of 
Bulgaria, of Armenia, and of Cuba, are entirely 
in point; and it is most probable that the conten- 
tions about the future of China will afford further 
illustration. Even in matters where the interest 
of nations is concerned, the moral element enters ; 



The Moral Aspect of War 49 

because each generation in its day is the guardian 
of those which shall follow it. Like all guardians, 
therefore, while it has the power to act according 
to its best judgment, it has no right, for the mere 
sake of peace, to permit known injustice to be 
done to its wards. 

The present strong feeling in favor of arbitra- 
tion, throughout the nations of the world, is in 
itself a subject for congratulation almost unal- 
loyed. It carries indeed a promise, to the cer- 
tainty of which no paper covenants can pretend; 
for it influences the conscience by inward convic- 
tion, not by external fetter. But it must be 
remembered that such sentiments, from their 
very universality and evident laudableness, need 
correctives, for they bear in themselves a great 
danger of excess or of precipitancy. Excess is 
seen in the disposition, far too prevalent, to look 
upon war not only as an evil, but as an evil un- 
mixed, unnecessary, and therefore always unjusti- 
fiable; while precipitancy, to reach results con- 
sidered desirable, is evidenced by the wish to 
impose arbitration, to prevent recourse to war, 
by a general pledge previously made. Both 
frames of mind receive expression in the words of 
speakers, among whom a leading characteristic 



50 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

is lack of measuredness and of proportion. Thus 
an eminent citizen is reported to have said: 
" There is no more occasion for two nations to go 
to war than for two men to settle their difficulties 
with clubs." Singularly enough, this point of 
view assumes to represent peculiarly Christian 
teaching. In so doing, it wilfully ignores the truth 
that Christianity, while it will not force the con- 
science by other than spiritual arguments, as 
" compulsory " arbitration might, distinctly rec- 
ognizes the sword as the resister and remedier of 
evil in the sphere " of this world.'' 

Arbitration's great opportunity has come in the 
advancing moral standards of states, whereby the 
disposition to deliberate wrong-doing has dimin- 
ished; consequently, the occasions for redressing 
wrong by force are less frequent to arise. In view 
of recent events however, and very especially of 
notorious, high-handed oppression, initiated since 
the calling of the Peace Conference,' and resolutely 
continued during its sessions in defiance of the 
public opinion of the world at large, it is pre- 

* Lest this be misunderstood to be an allusion to the recent 
measures of Japan in Korea, I renew here the caution that in 
this article all references to the Peace Conference are to that of 
1899. 



The Moral Aspect of War 51 

mature to assume that such occasions belong 
wholly to the past. Much less can it be assumed 
that there will be no further instances of a com- 
munity believing, conscientiously and entirely, that 
honor and duty require of it a certain course, 
which another community with equal integrity 
may hold to be inconsistent with the rights and 
obligations of its own members. It is, for in- 
stance, quite possible, especially to one who has 
recently visited Holland, to conceive that Great 
Britain and the Boers are alike satisfied of the 
substantial justice of their respective claims. It 
is permissible most earnestly to hope that, in 
disputes between sovereign states, arbitration may 
find a way to reconcile peace with fidelity to con- 
science, in the case of both; but if the conviction 
of conscience remains unshaken, war is better than 
disobedience, — better than acquiescence in recog- 
nized wrong. The great danger of undiscrimi- 
nating advocacy of arbitration, which threatens 
even the cause it seeks to maintain, is that it may 
lead men to tamper with equity, to compromise 
with unrighteousness, soothing their conscience 
with the belief that War is so entirely wrong that 
beside it no other tolerated evil is wrong. Witness 
Armenia, and witness Crete. War has been 



52 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

avoided; but what of the national consciences 
that beheld such iniquity and withheld the 
hand? 

Note. — This paper was the means of bringing into the 
author's hands a letter by the late General Sherman, which 
forcibly illustrates how easily, in quiet moments, men forget 
what they have owed, and still owe, to the sword. From 
the coincidence of its thought with that of the article itself, 
permission to print it here has been asked and received. 

New York, February 5th, 1890. 

Dear General Meigs, — I attended the Centennial 
Ceremonies in honor of the Supreme Court yesterday, four 
full hours in the morning at the Metropolitan Opera House, 
and about the same measure of time at the Grand Banquet 
of 850 lawyers in the evening at the Lenox Lyceum. 

The whole was superb in all its proportions, but it was no 
place for a soldier. I was bidden to the feast solely and 
exclusively because in 1858 for a few short months I was an 
attorney at Leavenworth, Kansas. 

The Bar Association of the United States has manifestly 
cast aside the Sword of Liberty. Justice and Law have 
ignored the significance of the Great Seal of the United 
States, with its emblematic olive branch and thirteen arrows, 
" all proper," and now claim that, without force. Law and 
moral suasion have carried us through one hundred years 
of history. Of course, in your study you will read at leisure 
these speeches, and if in them you discover any sense of 
obligation to the Soldier element, you will be luckier than 
I, a listener. 

From 186 1 to 1865 the Supreme Court was absolutely 



The Moral Aspect of War 53 

paralyzed: their decrees and writs were treated with con- 
tempt south of the Potomac and Ohio; they could not sum- 
mon a witness or send a Deputy Marshal. War, and the 
armed Power of the Nation, alone removed the barrier and 
restored to the U. S. courts their lawful jurisdiction. Yet, 
from these honied words of flattery, a stranger would have 
inferred that at last the lawyers of America had discovered 
the sovereign panacea of a Government without force, 
either visible or in reserve. 

I was in hopes the Civil War had dispelled this dangerous 
illusion, but it seems not. 

You and I can fold our hands and truly say we have done 
a man's share, and leave the consequences to younger men 
who must buffet with the next storms; but a Government 
which ignores the great truths illuminated in heraldic lan- 
guage over its very Capitol is not yet at the end of its woes. 

With profound respect, 

W. T. Sherman. 



Ill 

THE HAGUE CONFERENCE AND THE 
PRACTICAL ASPECT OF WAR 



THE HAGUE CONFERENCE AND THE 
PRACTICAL ASPECT OF WAR 

By Alfred T. Mahan 

National Review y June, 1907. 

IMMEDIATELY after the adjournment of the 
first Hague Conference, to which I had the 
honor of being a delegate, I was asked to write a 
paper upon some general bearings of the questions 
there entertained for discussion. This I did under 
the title of the Moral Aspect of War; ^ considering 
on what grounds, and how far, it was justifiable 
for a nation at the present stage of civilization 
to sign away beforehand its power of moral 
action, in undefined and unforeseen instances, 
under the plea, to me specious and misleading, 
of submitting to an impartial third party a question, 
not of interests, nor of facts, but of right and 
wrong, and therefore of conscience. I held that 
in such decisions a nation — as a man — might 
seek counsel, but could not abdicate responsibility. 

* " North American Review," October, 1899. 



58 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

Therefore it could not rightfully commit itself 
to such a course, in advance, except for such cases 
as admitted of clear definition; reserving to its 
own determination matters of moral obligation. 

To give again my arguments in detail is not here 
pertinent; but in one particular I may properly 
repeat, because it leads directly to my present 
theme, thus linking this article to its predecessor. 
I urged that it is not to be supposed that nations 
will antecedently submit themselves to a tribunal, 
the general principles of which have not been 
crystallized into a code of some sort. A Court of 
Arbitration, however constituted, should have laid 
down for its guidance and governance certain 
established rules, or body of precedents, which 
by common agreement have reached the authority 
of law, and so may justly be styled law inter- 
national; a code, to which appeal may be made, 
and upon which decision shall rest unchallengeable. 
Under present circumstances, when a case shall 
have arisen, and be pending, its characteristic 
features apparent, the nations concerned will know 
how far they can trust themselves, as a substitute 
for such a code, to the existing state of international 
law, undigested for final formal acceptance; but 
there is not the same assurance for an unknown 



The Practical Aspect of War 59 

incident of the future. Where an antecedent 
body of accepted law is wanting, arbitration be- 
comes a matter of personal beliefs or opinions on 
the part of the arbitrators ; just as many so-called 
treatises on international law express the views 
of the writers, frequently discordant, as to what 
law ought to be, rather than a definition of what 
it is. Such a definition in fact is impossible, be- 
cause there is not a law. Law, strictly so called, 
presupposes a law-maker; and for international 
law the law-maker has not yet come into existence. 
Particular nations have made treaties innumerable, 
which are laws unto the contracting parties, for 
they have power to frame and impose them; but 
not laws to other states over whom they have not 
power. 

The Hague Tribunal has already, in its brief 
existence, furnished a striking illustration of the 
dangers which may be apprehended from sub- 
mitting to it questions of right, as distinct from 
questions of fact, until by an agreement certain 
principles have been established, and their bearings 
in some measure defined by applying them to 
specific possible cases, thus making laws ; analogy 
from which might support action of the court if 
an unforeseen case arise. The instance is none 



6o Some Neglected Aspects of War 

the less striking because the nations referring it 
did so with full knowledge of the matter and inter- 
ests at stake, and of the existing condition of inter- 
national law. It merely makes all the stronger 
the argument that it is unsafe to bind oneself 
beforehand to submit cases that are not yet fore- 
seen. In the case of a delinquent state, com- 
pelled by armed force to settle the claims of its 
creditors, the Hague Tribunal has decided that in 
the subsequent payments the citizens of the 
states which thus resorted to arms to get back 
their money were entitled to be the first paid ; and 
great has been the indignation of those whose 
moral sense repudiates all recourse to force for such 
purposes. That this judgment rested technically 
upon the ground that the delinquent state had 
offered special guarantees only to the blockading 
nations, illustrates aptly the surprises that may 
await those who go to arbitration before details 
as well as principles are settled. In a pamphlet 
put forth under the auspices of a prominent Peace 
Association I find the following comment : " The 
decision has been much criticized, as appearing to 
encourage force in debt collecting ; but, in seeking 
a strictly legal solution, the arbitrators may have 
been forced to ignore the ethical question in- 



The Practical Aspect of War 6i 

volved." This supposed opposition between pre- 
sumed ethical right and strict law had better be 
adjusted, before a question involving ethics is 
submitted to a tribunal liable to fluctuations of 
opinion, as the individual members composing 
it vary. It can scarcely be alleged that anything 
like an international consensus now obtains as to 
the ethical propriety of forcing a nation to pay 
its creditors. I do not pretend to say which 
course is right from the moral standpoint; but, 
as international law till now has tolerated the 
forcible collection of such debts, I own to thinking 
that the peoples who by resort to authorized meth- 
ods obtained redress for all parties were entitled 
for their trouble and expense to have the first lien 
upon the security pledged. Others do not think 
so, and there you are. On either side of the dis- 
sent is a highly respectable body of opinion; but 
that of the judges goes. There is neither settled 
principle nor adverse precedent, and the result is 
a grudging acquiescence by the last served. 

In these cases, whatever be thought of the 
methods, the sufferers had little claim to sympathy, 
and the principle at stake, though novel and im- 
portant, can hardly be said to touch vital interests 
or national honor : but how far does the experience 



62 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

encourage nations, antecedently to knowledge of 
the questions that may arise, and with a body of 
formulated law as yet meagre, to intrust to such a 
tribunal matters which may involve vital interests, 
such as the United States conceives to be embodied 
in the Monroe Doctrine? or of moral propriety, 
which many Americans thought violated in the 
particular decision? When a case has arisen, a 
government may know the extent to which it 
commits itself in accepting arbitration; but for 
the unforeseen future what standards are there 
whereby to measure what the tribunal will do, or 
will not? what the maximum and minimum 
limits of its action, which by the hypothesis we 
have bound ourselves antecedently to accept? 
Is it practical to consign vital interests or national 
honor to so uncertain an issue, by failing to reserve 
them ? Indeed, would not the more prudent course 
be to state explicitly what character of cases would 
be submitted, and to reserve all others? This 
question much resembles that so much discussed 
of the powers of the General Government and 
of the several States in the American Union. 
If the nations are to confederate, should there not 
first be a Constitution? It is true that healthy 
constitutions grow, even when so rigidly guarded 



The Practical Aspect of War 63 

as that of the United States ; but through centuries 
of diplomacy the practice of nations has been 
slowly growing into a noteworthy bulk of prece- 
dents, material available for codification, after dis- 
cussion. 

Whether such codification is as yet practicable 
may be doubted, in view of the extensive argu- 
mentation still conducted by diplomacy over the 
bearing of so-called principles on current questions : 
but could it be effected in any degree, and. defi- 
nitely accepted by all the great nations, it would 
carry so far a certain assurance of justice, and 
thus to a great extent would limit the decisions of 
an arbitral body to a finding on the facts, to which 
principles or rules already established, and known 
beforehand, would be applied. So far as a man 
or a nation knows the tests that will be used, he 
or it can afford to mortgage his conscience in 
advance ; because adequately assured that right — 
to which principles apply — will not suffer, 
although interests, which depend upon the facts, 
may. But, really to be known, the principles must 
not be merely general in statement, but specific 
in their application to the range of international 
relations under consideration. Such application 
may fail of completeness, but should be attempted. 



64 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

Nothing is final, but none the less finality is a 
proper aim. An instance of such a compilation 
is the series of rules to govern the practices of 
war by land and sea in certain defined matters, 
drawn up by the first Hague Conference, and by 
it recommended for adoption to the governments 
represented. 

Now, such formulation of principles and rules, 
as far as it may go, is a tangible and practical 
substitute for war; and where approved and ac- 
cepted will to its extent avert war. Meanwhile, 
for the adjustment of unforeseen differences that 
continually arise, and will arise, we now have the 
established methods of diplomatic correspondence, 
and negotiations in their various orders, to which 
the last resort is war. War is one of the estab- 
lished methods of settlement. The practical 
aspect of war therefore is that it is a means, 
possibly crude and partial in operation, but for 
which as yet no satisfactory alternative has been 
devised, whereby a nation enforces a claim to 
what it considers essential interest or national 
honor. The recent collection of debts from one 
or more South American States was an act of 
war ; was war, though there was no formal procla- 
mation, little bloodshed, and no treaty of peace. 



The Practical Aspect of War 65 

What practical substitute was there for such 
action ? As far as I understand, none, except the 
view formulated, but not yet accepted generally 
by creditor nations, that a delinquent state should 
not be compelled to pay. I believe there was no 
question that the debts were due. The facts were 
admitted, but the question of principle was raised 
whether a government owed to its own citizens 
to collect such debt; or whether, as in blockade 
running, they must accept the consequences of 
their risks, in this case of lending on doubtful 
security. Evidently, if states are to arbitrate, 
this question of principle should be determined 
beforehand. As it is, all we have gained from the 
particular example is an evidence that arbitration, 
to be generally satisfactory, should proceed on 
principles formally recognized, and sufficiently 
developed in application to be a check upon a 
court's decisions. No international method can 
endure unless generally satisfactory. It is a 
general dissatisfaction which now seeks to dis- 
establish war ; but to be successful it must present 
an alternative that shall be workable, and not 
merely alluring. I strongly suspect that as yet a 
tempting prospect is taken for a solid reality. 
These cases have presented, in miniature, the 



66 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

sequence of cause and effect which up to the most 
serious international dispute issues in war, and 
which as yet in many cases can have no other 
outcome than war, or the retreat of one of the 
parties. Such retreat is usually because not strong 
enough to act ; it results from inadequate material 
power. It may not be overt; that is, the state 
which conceives itself or its people injured, may 
not go so far in its measures as to necessitate 
retreat. The South American States were under 
moral obligation to pay their debts ; they refused, 
and they retreated. Under pressure of force 
they discharged, or made provision for discharging, 
a moral duty which they had before declined. In 
the case of some States of the American Union, 
which at one time refused to meet their indebted- 
ness to British subjects, no threat of force was 
made, nor measure looking to force undertaken. 
It was not expedient; for, whatever the outcome, 
war would have cost too much in every way. 
The facts in neither case alter the question of 
moral obligation, nor is this affected by the partic- 
ular action in either. But the practical bearing 
and value of war, its practical aspect, is shown in 
both instances. In the one, war compelled pay- 
ment; in the other, power to fight enabled the 



The Practical Aspect 0} War 67 

debtor to be obstinate in his refusal, to gain, let 
us say, time to develop his resources and meet his 
obligations. In neither was concession made to 
the moral aspect of the question. Each was 
simply a practical exhibition of the influence of 
physical force. 

Is such emplo)niient of physical force as here 
illustrated a practical factor in the affairs of the 
world ? and is it a necessary factor ? The neces- 
sity is part of the practicality ; for, if there be an 
adequate and better alternative, it certainly is not 
practical to cling to the worse. I think the deter- 
mining consideration is this. Is the course of 
human conduct, individual or national, determined 
more by moral influences or by physical pressure ? 
by considerations of right and wrong, or by the 
needs of the body — food, drink, clothing? If 
we call ambition, or the love of adventure and 
action, a moral motive, these certainly count for 
much with those not in bodily need. I presume 
that in the career of Napoleon there is manifested 
beyond anything else the consuming necessity for 
the faculties of an intensely gifted man to find 
vent in corresponding action; and in degree 
smaller men, or nations through their rulers, feel 
and yield to the same impulse. And there are 



68 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

nobler motives, love of country or of race, liberty, 
religion, all prompting to extend influence or to 
resist wrong. Hampden's refusal to pay ship- 
money, that of the American colonists to submit 
to the stamp and tea duties, rest on the principle 
of no taxation except through representation. 
The smallness of the exactions involved places the 
resistances on the level of vindicating moral 
principle; but, after all, the principle itself rests 
upon the need of the individuals of a community 
to preserve to themselves, under adequate guar- 
antee, the necessaries and conveniences of life. 
In last analysis, and in by far the greater part, 
is it not so that bodily necessities, or, worse, bodily 
desires, chiefly move men and nations? What 
precipitated the outside barbarians, the migration 
of the peoples, upon the Roman Empire ? Bodily 
impulses; pressure from behind and alluring 
civilization in front. What for long checked the 
movement ? Resistant bodily organization of phys- 
ical force, the prevision of Caesar. What to-day 
is precipitating the outside world upon the Amer- 
ican continents — men forsaking their families, 
families their homes and kindred, the sacred 
associations of centuries, in search of material 
betterment? From the east and from the west, 



The Practical Aspect of War 69 

from Europe arid from Asia, the flood impends; 
in that from Europe regulated by force, the force 
of national tradition organized in power, control- 
ling and absorbing the foreign elements; in the 
Asiatic instance excluding, also by force; force 
which is invoked by those who fear the effect of 
increasing numbers and cheaper labor upon their 
own material welfare. Is there in any of these 
movements a moral motive upon which dependence 
can be placed for restraint, and to which appeal 
may be addressed? Or is the successful control 
so far exercised simply that of organized physical 
force, retarding consequences in order that adjust- 
ment may take place, as did Caesar? If so, what 
more practical? and what is organized physical 
control but war in posse ? — nay, rather, it is war 
in esse. 

Again, look, which are to-day the most aggressive 
nations, in the sense of seeking external expansion ? 
I here use the word " aggressive " in no invidious 
or condemnatory sense, but in that neutral moral 
signification which inheres in its derivation, of 
motion towards an end to be attained, or a some- 
thing needed — a phase of the world-wide struggle 
between the haves and the have-nots. Are they 
not Germany, Japan, Russia? And why? Am- 



70 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

bition? I scarcely think so, except as perception 
of national necessities by a government, and desire 
to provide for them, may be so called. The motive 
which impels them may be touched and influenced 
by moral considerations, good or bad; but the 
prime characteristic is material. Food, drink, 
clothing, are the simplest expression of the bodily 
demands; but to these the refinements of civili- 
zation have given a development beyond mere 
exigency to reasonable comfort. Provision for 
these requires space proportioned to numbers, 
and it requires also opportunity. The numbers 
of Germany and Japan press for larger room, and 
for a wide extension of commercial opportunity; 
both which are wanted to feed their millions, to 
give them meat with their bread. They are 
have-nots; the former aggressive careers of the 
maritime states. Great Britain and France, the 
as yet superabundant territory of the United States, 
place them in the class of the haves. Russia, 
less cramped for mere territory, needs sea room. 
Doubled back again upon herself, as in 1856 and 
1878, she now lies convulsed, in labor of the free- 
dom which happier conditions of inter-communi- 
cation with other states might have brought to her 
as it has to them. The children are come to the 



The Practical Aspect of War 71 

birth, and there is not strength to bring forth. 
Hemmed in so far successfully on the Black Sea 
and towards the Indian Ocean, she has seen 
herself baffled again in the third and last remaining 
solution of a problem involving the material 
well-being of her population. At a critical mo- 
ment of national expansion Russia has been foiled, 
because in face of an inevitable " irrepressible 
conflict " she had neglected to prepare for war. 
I do not defend her recent conduct ; I merely note 
her need. As far as my not too profound knowl- 
edge of the circumstances goes, it has been impos- 
sible to refuse my S3mipathy to Japan in the pre- 
cedent events which constituted the occasion for 
the war. But, as distinct from its occasion, the 
cause lay deep in the material pressures resting 
upon either nation. Will you meet such a conflict 
on the one side or the other, or on both, by an 
appeal to a moral argument of such doubtful 
vindication as the wrongfulness of war, with the 
moral alternative of submission to an extraneous 
court of unsympathetic strangers? There can be 
legal decision upon a legal point, where a law exists ; 
but can there be true ethical fairness without 
sympathetic intuition of national difficulties, and 
can S3nnpathy hold an even balance? Why 



72 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

should I trust the crying needs of my children to 
the decisions of another than myself? Is it, 
indeed, moral to do so? Is not material force, 
after all, the one practical arbiter between two 
opposing material impulses, because as things 
have been, and are, it alone gives rest? Such 
opposition of material forces may merely exert the 
effect of war. It may not bring war ; yet again it 
may. To this Japan and Russia both appealed ; the 
fittest in this respect won out ; and so long as she 
remains fittest the result promises permanency. 
In putting forward these truths of material 
pressure with a bareness perhaps somewhat brutal, 
I must not be understood to justify, far less to 
advocate, the predominance of material consid- 
erations over moral. I simply look existing facts 
in the face, which is in strict accord with my pro- 
posed point of view — the Practical Aspect of War ; 
the place of War in the economy of the world which 
now is, and the possibility of shortly replacing it 
with some alternative equally efficacious and less det- 
rimental, the world remaining the same. I believe, 
with full intensity of personal conviction, that when 
moral motives come to weigh heavier with man- 
kind than do material desires there will be no war, 
and coincidentally therewith better provision of 



The Practical Aspect of War 73 

reasonable bodily necessities to all men. But 
the truth still remains as stated by Jesus Christ 
twenty centuries ago, that between material and 
moral motives men and nations must commit them- 
selves to a definite choice ; one or the other — not 
both. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. By 
His own definition Mammon applies as clearly to 
the simplest bodily necessities, to the mere food 
and clothing, as to the grossest insolence of luxury. 
The question is not of the degree of the devotion, 
but of the service chosen, of the Master. This 
will be either the moral motives summed up in the 
phrase Kingdom of God, or the material. So 
far as the advocacy of peace rests upon material 
motives of economy and prosperity, it is the service 
of Mammon ; and the bottom of the platform will 
drop out when Mammon thinks that war will pay 
better. The common sense of mankind recog- 
nizes the truth of this affirmation. We speak of 
mixed motives; but we know that, be they two 
or many, one alone receives true allegiance and 
will prevail. The others may modify or hamper ; 
to one alone belongs the title " master; " and we 
have common proverbs and common experience 
that the service of the moral assures in the end 
sufficiency of the material. 



74 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

I believe that the time is coming when conviction 
of this truth will take place in practice, and that 
indications of its distant arrival can be seen; but 
meantime, I now also see in profoundest peace an 
ignoble struggle, not for enough, but for wanton 
profusion; motives strictly material asserting 
themselves unblushingly in mutual conflict for 
mastery ; nay, peace and arbitration advocated on 
the most purely material grounds. I distrust the 
spirit of a civilization that w^ould have stopped, 
if it could, the intervention of the United States 
between Spain and Cuba. It was a fresh assertion 
of the superiority of material considerations in a 
decision essentially moral. That the question 
was thus regarded I had an interesting demonstra- 
tion. It happened that I was in Rome at the time 
war was declared, and dined in company with 
several of the diplomatic body. " Oh yes," said 
one of them to me, ^^ it is all very well to talk of 
sympathy with the Cubans and Spanish mis- 
government. The truth is the United States 
wants Cuba." I inferred this to be the general 
standpoint. Now, I am particularly qualified 
to speak impartially as to my countrymen's 
attitude; for I myself thought if we went to war 
we had better take Cuba, the military importance 



The Practical Aspect of War 75 

of which to our position has been evident ever 
since we became a nation. I was out of sympathy 
with the self-denying resolution of Congress, 
which in advance pledged us to non-acquisition; 
but I entirely believe that it represented the pre- 
dominant feeling in America. In other words, 
the motive of the war, whether mistaken or not, 
was moral ; and to it therefore material argument 
should not be addressed. It is non- pertinent ; an 
expression which has a less courteous equiva- 
lent. 

If it be true, as I have expressed my own con- 
viction, that moral motives are gaining in force 
the world over, we can have hope of the time when 
they shall prevail ; but it is evident that they must 
prevail over all nations equally, or with some 
approach to equality, or else discussion between 
two disputants will not rest on the same plane. 
In the difference between the United States and 
Spain, I suppose the argument of the United 
States, the moral justification to itself of its pro- 
posed action, would be that misgovernment of 
Cuba, and needless Cuban suffering, had contin- 
ued so long as to show that Spain was not capable 
of giving good government to her distant depend- 
ency. There was no occasion to question her 



76 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

desire to give it, the honesty either of her asser- 
tions or measures to that end; but it was quite 
apparent that it was not in her to give effect to her 
efforts. Now, presuming Spain to take that 
view, it is conceivable (to the imagination) that 
her rulers might say, ^' Yes, it is true, we have 
failed continuously. The Cubans have a moral 
right to good government, and as we have not been 
able to give it them, it is right that we should step 
out." But, assuming Spain unequal to such 
sublime moral conviction and self-abnegation, 
what was the United States to do, as a practical 
matter? What she did was perfectly practical; 
she used the last argument of nations as inter- 
national law stands ; but, suppose she had gone to 
arbitration, upon what grounds would the Court 
proceed? What the solid pre-arranged basis of 
its decision, should that be that Spain must 
evacuate Cuba? Is there anything in the present 
accord of states, styled International Law, that 
would give such power? And, more pertinent 
still, are states prepared now to concede to an 
arbitral Court the power to order them out of 
territory which in its opinion they misgovern, 
or which in its opinion they should not retain 
after conquest? e. g., Schleswig Holstein, Alsace 



The Practical Aspect of War 77 

and Lorraine, the Transvaal, Porto Rico and the 
Philippine Islands? 

Or, take another impending and very momen- 
tous instance, one fraught with immeasurable 
issues. If I rightly appreciate conditions, there 
is, among the English-speaking communities bor- 
dering the Pacific, a deep instinctive popular 
determination, one of those before which rulers 
have to bow, to exclude, from employment in the 
sparsely settled territories occupied by them, the 
concentrated crowded mass of mankind found in 
Japan and China. More than anything else this 
sums up the question of the Pacific. Two seas 
of humanity, on very different levels as to numbers 
and economical conditions, stand separated only 
by this artificial dyke of legislation, barring the 
one from rushing upon and flooding the other. I 
do not criticize an attitude with which, whether I 
approve or not, I can sympathize; but as I look 
at the legislation, and contrast the material condi- 
tions, I wonder at the improvidence of Australasia 
in trusting that laws, though breathing the ut- 
most popular conviction and purpose, can protect 
their lands from that which threatens. " Go 
home," said Franklin to a fellow colonist in the 
days of unrest in America, ^' and tell them to get 



78 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

children. That will settle all our difficulties." 
Fill up your land with men of your own kind, 
if you wish to keep it for yourselves. The Pacific 
States of North America are filling up, and, more 
important, they back solidly upon, and are polit- 
ically one with, other great communities into which 
the human tide is pouring apace ; yet in them, too, 
labor may inflict upon its own aims revolutionary 
defeat, if for supposed local advantage it embar- 
rasses the immigration of its own kind. It is 
very different for those who are severed from their 
like by sea, and therefore must stand on their own 
bottom. All the naval power of the British Empire 
cannot suffice ultimately to save a remote com- 
munity which neither breeds men in plenty nor 
freely imports them. 

We speak of these questions now as racial, and 
the expression is convenient. It is compact, and 
represents truly one aspect of such situations, 
which, however, are essentially economical and 
territorial. In long-settled countries race and 
territory tend to identity of meaning, but we need 
scarce a moment's recollection to know that race 
does not bind as do border lines, nor even they as 
do economical facts. Economical facts largely 
brought about the separation of America from 



The Practical Aspect of War 79 

Great Britain; economical facts brought about 
the American Union and continue to bind it. The 
closer union of the territories which now constitute 
the British Empire must be found in economical 
adjustments; the fact of common race is not 
sufficient thereto. Now, economical influences 
are of the most purely material order — the order 
of personal self-interest; in that form at least 
they appeal to the great majority, for the instructed 
political economists form but a small proportion 
of any community. Race, yes ; territory — coun- 
try — yes; the heart thrills, the eyes fill, self- 
sacrifice seems natural, the moral motive for the 
moment prevails; but in the long run the hard 
pressure of economical truth comes down upon 
these with the tyranny of the despot. There are, 
indeed, noble leaders not a few, who see in this 
crushing burden upon their fellow millions an 
enemy to be confronted and vanquished, not by 
direct opposition, but by circumvention, reheving 
his sway by bettering environment, and so giving 
play to the loftier sentiments. But that these 
men may so work they need to be, as we say, in- 
dependent, released from the grip of daily 
bread; and their very mission, ahke in its suc- 
cess and its failures, testifies to the preponder- 



8o Some Neglected Aspects of War 

ant weight of economical conditions in the social 
world. 

Nor in the social world only. We shall not 
see aright the political movement of the world 
at large, the course of history past and present, 
until we discern underlying all, consciously or 
blindly, these primitive physical necessities, direct- 
ing the desires of the peoples, and through them 
the course of their governments. Rightly do we 
call them economical — household — for they come 
home to the many firesides whence their stern 
exactions have exiled politics and sentiment; and 
herein, in the weight of struggling numbers, lies 
the immensity of their strength. Race and country 
but furnish a means for organizing and fortifying 
their action, bringing to it the sanction and inspira- 
tion of the loftier motives embodied in these conse- 
crated words. But these holy names, while facili- 
tating and intensifying local action, by the same 
means separate nation from nation, setting up 
hearthstone against hearthstone. Hence imphcit 
war is perennial; antagonism lurks beneath the 
most smiling surface and the most honest inter- 
changes of national sympathies. We have but 
to note the wave of emotion which passed over the 
United States at the first hint of possible hostilities 



The Practical Aspect of War 8i 

with Japan, and the suggestion that the Anglo- 
Japanese alhance might bring about collision with 
the two peoples. As far as appeared from all 
observable signs, the great majority of Americans 
had sympathized most cordially with Japan in the 
recent struggle; and I have thought to note clear 
indications that the American Press was becoming 
more and more deeply convinced of the common 
interests which should bring into unpledged 
accord the general external policies of Great 
Britain and the United States. It needed only 
the reading of the treaty to see that its particular 
obligation would not arise, unless war led the 
United States to seek to deprive Japan of terri- 
tory — a most impossible contingency; but not 
every one has copies of treaties immediately 
accessible, nor takes the pains to consult them. 
National sentiment, like family feeling, is a perma- 
nent force, the influence of which, thus startled, 
deflects national sympathy and policy as a magnet 
does a compass. 

Little more than a generation ago, who so dear 
to Americans as Russia? then perhaps the only 
European government which, whatever the spring 
of its motives, cordially s)mipathized with that of 
the United States in the War of Secession; how 



82 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

few her friends in her recent struggle with Japan. 
It will be said with justice, as well as appositeness, 
that just such transient indications of the insta- 
bility of national sympathies, here to-day, there 
to-morrow, prove the need of arbitration to avert 
war. Certainly, if no other means can be found. 
To go to war on questions of mere feeling, or on 
occasional offence, is far from practical. As a 
matter of fact, however, such occasions now 
rarely threaten war. Time to solve them is 
usually obtained by the ordinary means of diplo- 
macy, and the premature intrusion of a third 
party is rather an irritation than a help. Not 
every case of conscience calls for a confessor, nor 
every dispute for an arbitrator. But where feeling 
is rooted in permanent conditions, arises from them, 
and grows with their continuance, or their in- 
crease, you have a radically different proposition. 
Such is the legislation of exclusion considered a 
few lines back. It rests upon material motives, 
and acts by the material implements of organized 
force; and thus acting it is practical (not neces- 
sarily right) in aim and in methods. But these 
methods, whether directed against persons or 
goods, are essentially war ; defensive or offensive, 
as it may please either race to regard it; and the 



The Practical Aspect of War S3 

popular feeling which underlies is implicit war in a 
most dangerous form, liable at a breath to bring 
people to the very verge of hostilities, and that 
with an impetus very likely to carry them over. It 
is necessary to recognize that measures of external 
policy which find their origin in such popular 
sentiment, or political conviction, present to the 
government concerned internal problems, as really 
such as those more conamonly so called; and, 
because internal, they from their very nature cannot 
be committed to external decision, except that of 
force. Force, the issue of war, carries with it to 
the populace a practical weight of conviction, 
with which no other arbiter can vie. The Monroe 
Doctrine, indeterminate in scope because it has 
steadily grown, and of which therefore finality 
cannot be affirmed, is a matter of external policy ; 
but the national conviction, internal compulsion, 
would not permit a government, in face of an 
immediate question, to submit it to arbitration. 
If, in the absence of any present issue, it were pro- 
posed to submit the Monroe Doctrine for definition 
and limitation to some high Court of Arbitration, 
to determine whether it should have international 
acceptance, and how far, I am not qualified to 
say whether the people of the United States would 



84 Some Neglected Aspects 0} War 

acquiesce in their government entertaining the 
proposal; but sure I am that if any European 
state should attempt now to annex some part of 
American territory, the suggestion to arbitrate 
would be rejected overwhelmingly. Further, such 
prior determination by a Court would be a precise 
instance of what I have styled codification — I 
hope not too loosely. 

It is perhaps too anxious a forecast, but one 
naturally inquires how far this process of inter- 
national control over quasi-external matters of 
policy may go; whereunto it may grow? If 
representations might have been made to Great 
Britain in 1899 concerning her relations to the 
Transvaal, taking political and warlike action 
within a territory of recent acquisition and con- 
ditioned sovereignty, shall it go on to suggesting 
arbitration should there again be Irish insurrec- 
tion ? But, barring such flights of an untempered 
imagination, how far is arbitration qualified to 
adjust on solid foundations the political control 
of regions where strong economical forces are 
struggling to assert themselves, notably the Pacific? 
Take the conspicuous instance of the Hawaiian 
Islands. Their area and resources, to be sure, do 
not bulk very largely in an estimate of force 



The Practical Aspect of War 85 

simply economical; but their geographical situa- 
tion gives them great military importance, and 
so contributes to the determination of that 
political control which artificially regulates 
commercial movement and economical rela- 
tions. The islands are a big factor in the 
question of the Pacific. Now, by the census of 
1900, in a population of 154,000, there were 61,000 
Japanese and 26,000 Chinese, between whom 
there may be assumed a solidarity of interest, for 
which it is conceivable that Japan under some 
circumstances might feel induced to stand sponsor. 
Whatever the reasons then may have been, it is 
understood that some ten years ago she testified 
uneasiness at the prospect of American annexation, 
which since then has taken place. The white 
population is 28,000. On the other hand, the 
group is much farther from Japan than from the 
United States, which cannot but see in them a 
potential military danger if in the hands of a 
foreign Power. This is quite as reasonable a 
cause for uneasiness as the fortunes of what, after 
all, is a very small fraction, and that an expatriated 
fraction, of the Japanese people. Let us suppose 
that by a surprise, like that of the Russian fleet 
by Admiral Togo, the islands should pass into the 



86 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

possession of Japan, and that the world should then 
throw itself between the opponent nations, crying 
'^ Arbitrate ! " upon what principles would the 
Court proceed? To what sort of a bargain 
would either nation be committing itself? What- 
ever the good- will and integrity of the Court, it 
would be a leap in the dark; and, for my part, 
unless the world can absolutely guarantee that 
there shall never again be war, I do not see how 
the United States can run the risk of an adverse 
decision. 

It is in ignoring such considerations as those 
cited in this paper — the general question of the 
Pacific, the need of Russia for the sea, the require- 
ments of expansion by Germany and Japan, the 
case of Cuba, the Monroe Doctrine — that rests 
much of the fallacy of the unconditional advocates 
of arbitration. They are not looking upon the 
world as it now is, but upon an ideal, which the 
future may fulfil but the present has not reached. 
At a recent gathering an eminent American has 
said that war decides only which nation is the 
stronger. If by this was meant, as probably was, 
that war is not a moral arbiter, does not settle an 
ethical question, it is incontestable. We should 
have long outlived the idea underlying the ordeal 



The Practical Aspect of War 87 

of battle, that war is an appeal to the God of Hosts 
to judge a quarrel. We retain the expression, 
perhaps; but it is an archaic poeticism, better 
abandoned because misleading. War now is, and 
historically long has been, waged on a basis of 
asserted right or need; and what it does help to 
determine is that which is known in physics as the 
resultant of forces, of which itself is one ; the others 
being the economical and political necessities or 
desires of the contending parties. The other 
forces exist, aggressive, persistent; unless con- 
trolled by the particular force we call war, in posse 
or in esse, they reach a solution which is just as 
really one of force, and may be as unrighteous, 
and more so, than any war. For instance, except 
for war. Southern slavery probably would still 
exist. This is actually the state of the world at 
the present moment; and while a better balance- 
wheel than war may be conceived, it is at present 
doing its work fairly well. The proper temper in 
which to approach arbitration is not by picturing an 
imaginary political society of nations and races, but 
the actual one now existing in this tough old world. 
The globe on which we dwell bears witness to 
us intermittently that it undergoes recurrent 
processes of adjustment, between conditions un- 



88 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

evenly distributed and forces in opposition to one 
another. Doubtless, some time before we settle 
down to the state of the moon, adjustment will 
give us a period of stagnation and permanence; 
but so long as the imprisoned forces are struggling 
for room, and a balance is not reached, either by 
the subjection of some or equal opportunity for 
all, we will have to expect and acquiesce in occa- 
sional explosions. To a certain Hmited extent a 
third party, man, arbitrates at times, estabhshing 
a control of intellect which rather guides than 
represses. The steam which moves his navies 
and his railroads is that which mutilates Mar- 
tinique or blows off the top of Vesuvius. It is 
much the same with the series of political events 
which testify to the movement of economical 
forces. These are more masterful now than two 
centuries ago, because the popular will which 
prompts them has emancipated itself from the 
personal arbiters, the popes, kings, and aristoc- 
racies, of the earlier dates. We are, so to say, 
more directly in contact with the primitive impulses 
of mankind, and on a grander scale. We can see 
more deeply what it all means, or may mean; 
not the whole, nor yet to the bottom, but still more 
than formerly. The forces are blind, perhaps; 



The Practical Aspect of War 89 

none testify to this with greater conviction than 
some of those who hope most from the thought of 
controUing them by arbitration ; who by excluding 
war from the resorts of mankind would expect 
an adjustment more permanent than that which 
these forces, unrepressed, but not unmodified, 
can reach for themselves. 

Is the idea practical ? Is it more practical than 
War has proved ? The latter is accompanied by 
an immense waste of energy and of substance. 
So is steam ; yet just now it is the great motor of 
the world. Economize, doubtless, to the utmost, 
by bettering your processes. Reduce the fre- 
quency of actual war by such measures as may be 
practicable; but simultaneously and correlatively 
make it more efficient, and therefore less wasteful 
of time and of energy. At present this is being 
done generally, and is probably more immediately 
practical to the repression of war than any methods 
of arbitration can soon be made. Do not lose 
sight of the fact that all organized force is in 
degree war, and that upon organized force the 
world so far has progressed and still progresses. 
Upon organized force depends the extended 
shield, under which the movements of peace ad- 
vance in quietness; and of organized force war 



go Some Neglected Aspects of War 

is simply the last expression. To law and to 
beneficence organized force supplies the instru- 
ment, which the body gives to the spirit. ; Europe 
has well nigh reached a condition of internal 
stability, but she has reached it by war and she 
maintains it by preparation for war. The wants 
of mankind have been the steam of progress; 
they have not merely turned the wheels of the 
engine, they have burst the bonds of opposition 
and enabled the fitter to enter upon the unim- 
proved heritage of the unfit. Where such bonds 
still exist, there must be a conflict of forces, and 
it passes the power of mere intellect with legal 
theories of justice and injustice, of prescriptive 
rights, to keep the contest within bounds, unless 
it can bring to its support physical aid. The one 
practical thing to hold it in abeyance is that the 
several forces, including military power, should 
show what is in them by the adequacy of their 
development. 

If with wealth, numbers and opportunity, a 
people still cannot so organize their strength as 
to hold their own, it is not practical to expect that 
those to whom wealth and opportunity are lacking, 
but who have organizing faculty and willingness 
to fight, will not under the pressure of need enter 



The Practical Aspect of War 91 

upon an inheritance which need will persuade 
themselves is ethically their due. What, it may 
be asked, is likely to be the reasoning of an intelli- 
gent Chinese or Japanese workman, realizing the 
relative opportunities of his crowded country 
and those of Australia and Cahfornia, and finding 
himself excluded by force? What ethical, what 
moral, value will he find in the contention that his 
people should not resort to force to claim a share 
in the better conditions from which force bars 
him? How did the white races respect the policy 
of isolation in Japan and China, though it only 
affected commercial advantages ? I do not in the 
least pronounce upon the ethical propriety of 
exclusion by those in possession — the right of 
property, now largely challenged. I merely draw 
attention to the apparent balance of ethical argu- 
ment, with the fact of antagonistic economical 
conditions; and I say that for such a situation 
the only practical arbiter is the physical force, of 
which war is merely the occasional political 
expression. 

In the broad outlook, which embraces not merely 
armed collision, but the condition of preparation 
and attitude of mind that enable a people to put 
forth, on demand, the full measure of their physical 



92 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

strength, — numerical, financial and military, — to 
repel a threatened injury or maintain a national 
right, War is the regulator and adjuster of those 
movements of the peoples, which in their ten- 
dencies and outcome constitute history. These 
are natural forces, which from their origin and 
power are self-existent and independent in relation 
to man. His provision against them is War; 
the artificial organization of other forces, intrinsic- 
ally less powerful materially, but with the ad- 
vantage which intelligent combination and direc- 
tion confer. By this he can measurably control, 
guide, delay, or otherwise beneficially modify, 
results which threaten to be disastrous in their 
extent, tendency, or suddenness. So regarded 
War is remedial or preventive. 

I apprehend that these two adjectives, drawn 
from the vocabulary of the healer, embody both 
the practical and moral justification of war. An 
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It 
will be well that we invoke moral power to help 
heal the evils of the world, as the physician brings 
it to bear on the ills of the body ; but few are pre- 
pared to rely upon it alone. We need material 
aid as well. The dykes of Holland withstand by 
direct opposition the natural mission of the North 



The Practical Aspect of War 93 

Sea to swallow up the land they protect. The 
levees of the Mississippi restrain and guide to 
betterment the course of the mighty current, 
which but for them would waste its strength to 
devastate the shores on either hand. These two 
artificial devices represent a vast expenditure of 
time, money, and energy; of unproductive labor 
so-called; but they are cheaper than a flood. 
The pohce of our great cities prevent the outburst 
of crime, the fearful possibilities of which manifest 
themselves on the happily rare occasions when 
material prevention has from any cause lapsed. 
The pohce bodies are a great expense; but they 
cost less than a few days of anarchy. Let us not 
deceive ourselves by fancying that the strong 
material impulses which drive those masses of 
men whom we style nations, or races, are to be 
checked or guided, unless to the argument of a 
reasonable contention there be given the strong 
support of organized material power. If the 
organized disappear, the unorganized will but 
come into surer and more dreadful collision. 



IV 

WAR FROM THE CHRISTIAN 
STANDPOINT 



WAR FROM THE CHRISTIAN STAND- 
POINT 

By Alfred T. Mahan, U. S. N. 

A Paper Read before the Church Congress^ Providence^ Rhode 
Island^ November 15, 1900 

IN considering my subject, — War from the 
Christian point of view, — I assume that the 
test to which the idea of War is to be brought, and 
by which resort to it is to be justified or condemned, 
is to be sought in the acts and teaching of the 
Divine Founder of Christianity, our Lord Jesus 
Christ, and in the writings of those His immediate 
followers and Apostles that are accepted by the 
Christian Church as part of the revelation divinely 
inspired, and to her committed. For this discus- 
sion I recognize no other standard, however 
apparently exalted and humane. Such other 
standard may to some seem higher than that of 
Christianity, but it is not the Christian standpoint. 
I admit, of course, that any inferences of my own, 
drawn from the standards I accept, however con- 



98 Some Neglected Aspects oj War 

elusive they may be to myself, are, like all human 
reasonings, subject to dispute by others ; and that 
even the general consensus of Christian opinion 
through long ages, though powerful in cumulative 
effect, is not to be considered final, for I am not 
av^are of any authoritative utterance of the Church 
in the matter. 

In approaching the consideration of War from 
the Christian standpoint, one is immediately con- 
fronted v^ith the fact, to v^hich he must address him- 
self, that there exists at the present day in many 
of the Christian community an uneasy feeling 
that War, because of the painful incidents attend- 
ing it, cannot in any way or in any degree be recon- 
ciled with the profession and practice of Chris- 
tianity. This feeling, let me say in passing, is, in 
my opinion, not of Christian origin, but has rather 
been imported into and imposed upon Chris- 
tianity by those alien to its beliefs, or defective in 
their tenure of them. Christianity deplores War 
as an evil; it does not, as exempHfied by its 
highest exponents, reject it as necessarily evil. 
The most conspicuous apostles of the extreme 
position in condemning War are not now Christian 
believers. In illustration of this remark I would 
cite on the one hand Herbert Spencer, Frederic 



War jrom the Christian Standpoint 99 

Harrison, and John Morley; on the other the 
present Bishop of Durham,' whose position in 
deprecation of War appears to me as advanced 
as is consistent with conservative recognition of 
Christian authorities. 

This feehng, that War is irreconcilable with 
Christianity, if it becomes conviction, rejects im- 
plicitly the proposition that War is remedial; for, 
so far as this proposition is true, viz., that War 
is a remedy for greater evils, especially moral 
evils. War is justified. War, in short, is justified 
as an element of human progress, necessitated by 
a condition of mankind obviously far removed 
from Christian perfection, and, because of this 
imperfection, susceptible of remedy. 

This, in brief, is my proposition. It does not 
commit me to the' position that War is in all 
circumstances justified as a means of redressing 
wrong, nor to the defense of wars of any particular 
character. Dynastic wars, wars of conquest, wars 
clearly unrighteous, with these I have nothing 
to do. I afiirm merely the general proposition: 
that in the present imperfect and frequently 
wicked state of mankind, evil easily may, and often 

* The late Bishop Westcott, who has died since this paper 
was read. 



loo Some Neglected Aspects of War 

does, reach a point where it must be controlled, 
perhaps even destroyed, by physical force ; and if 
the evil-doer has the means to resist, and does 
resist, by force, the obligation to destroy the evil, 
and the evil-doer, if need be, still exists. The 
result then is War. 

I do not appear before you, therefore, as an 
apologist for War, in the modem colloquial sense 
of the word " apology." I do not feel myself 
hampered by any uneasy distrust of the soundness 
of my cause. I affirm that War, under conditions 
that may and do arise, is righteous ; and, further, 
that under such conditions it is distinctly an 
unrighteous deed to refrain from forcibly redressing 
evil, when it is in the power of thine hand to do 
so. 

On the other hand, to clear the ground of boot- 
less discussion, I admit willingly that War is — • 
not evil — but an evil; a very different thing. 
Amputation is an evil, but it is not evil. I admit 
that, were the universal world living a life of 
Christian perfection. War would be unnecessary 
and wrong ; and, finally, as the world is doubtless 
progressing, I gladly concede the duty of mini- 
mizing the frequency of War. 

At the same time, I grievously suspect some of 



War from the Christian Standpoint loi 

the modem suggested substitutes for the arbitra- 
ment of War, and notably that of obligatory resort 
to a court of arbitration. I conceive that, on 
the one hand, the sense of nationahty is still too 
strong; and on the other, that the interests and 
sympathies of peoples are too intertwined, by the 
present closeness of communication, to admit 
of impartiality. Where would have been found 
an impartial arbitrator in the late war in South 
Africa? The whole world seethed with bias on 
the one side or the other. What do most think of 
the impartiality of the arbitration tribunal — for 
such it was — which decided the election to the 
Presidency of the United States between Hayes 
and Tilden, in 1877? 

I have affirmed that under some conditions it is 
unrighteous not to use force to the extent of War. 
It will be asked. What conditions — from the 
Christian standpoint? In reply, I apply St. 
PauPs words: "Whatsoever is not of faith — of 
conviction — is sin." ^ For the nation, as for the 
individual, conscience must be the judge; nor, 
in my judgment, is the national conscience justi- 
fied in turning a case over to arbitration until it is 
satisfied that the matter is such that the decision 

* Romans, xiv, 23. 



I02 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

either way will not violate its conscientious con- 
viction of right. 

It is not needless to remark how grave a burden 
of obligation this lays upon citizens who are alive 
to Christian obligation, to exhaust the spiritual 
privileges of prayer, and of power with God, 
which He has given to them. It is not needless to 
say this; for, while I have seen much utterance 
upon recent questions of national interest, often 
fierce denunciation, clerical and lay, of one thing 
I have been privileged to see httle; and that is 
the calm reminder, clear of all political expression, 
that the prayer of Christians can certainly obtain 
from on high the guidance of the national con- 
science. No check on an unrighteous war can 
equal this. 

It will be objected to me — and accurately — 
that so far I have only given the standard by which 
the justice of a war is, in my opinion, to be decided, 
from a Christian standpoint; that I have quietly 
assumed and affirmed, — not proved, — that War 
is ever justifiable from a Christian standpoint. 
This is true ; I proceed to this argument. 

There are certain contentions with which I pre- 
sume an audience like this will not expect me to 
deal. For instance, that War is forbidden by the 



War from the Christian Standpoint 103 

commandment, " Thou shalt not kill/^ taken 
arbitrarily out of an extensive code which elsewhere 
commands the killing of men for several specified 
offenses. Or again, that the imagery of the Bible 
is to be pressed into service : that our Lord Jesus 
Christ is the " Prince of Peace ; " ' oblivious of the 
other image that " In righteousness He doth 
judge and make War." * Again, there are argu- 
ments for the permissibility of War, to professing 
Christians; for example, the failure to condemn 
it, either explicitly, or by clear inference, or 
to require abandonment of their profession by 
converted soldiers, such as the centurion Cor- 
nelius.3 These, being familiar, I shall not 
repeat. 

Nor do I adopt for my own the argument of the 
virtues developed by War: self-sacrifice, endur- 
ance, etc. Like the sufferings of War, these are 
to my mind incidental, not of the essence. Neither 
do I accept the view of some respectable authorities, 
that War is a final appeal to the judgment 
of God. On the contrary, this directly traverses 
my own position, which is, that, a case 

* Isaiah, ix, 6. 

* Revelations, xix, 1 1 - 1 3 

* Acts, X. 



104 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

of possible war arising, God has given us a 
conscience, with revealed data, and necessary 
faculties for decision; I, therefore, should no 
more expect enlightenment as to His judgment 
upon the case, by recourse to War, than I should 
by tossing a penny. The one method no more 
than the other has the sanction of His Word; 
indeed the casting of the lot has the greater, 
though insufficient, sanction. The last instance 
of resort to this means, ' in order to ascertain 
God's will, preceded the giving of the Holy 
Ghost. 

War is the employment of force for the attain- 
ment of an object, or for the prevention of an 
injury. If the object be wrong, the action is also 
wrong; here is no question. But how if the 
object be right ? Does our Lord, do His Apostles, 
by act or by word, teach or imply that it is wrong 
to use force to attain a righteous end? By their 
teaching, is such use of force always the doing 
evil that good may come ? 

I think not; personally, I am sure not. Non- 
resistance to evil is one of the leading traits of our 
Lord's character; the fact emphasizes the signif- 
icance of His use of force, not on His own behalf, 

* Acts i, 24 - 26. 



War jrom the Christian Standpoint 105 



to expel the sacrilegious from the Temple.' He 
is the Lamb dumb before the shearer, who also 
forbids railing accusations; yet from His lips 
issue the words, " Go ye and tell that fox; "^ and, 
" Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers ! " ^ 

The one positive act of the expulsion of the 
money-changers, for which I am not aware that 
He had the warrant of official authority, indorses 
the use of force upon due occasion, notwithstand- 
ing His numerous utterances in favor of generally 
opposite conduct. But these latter also, in my 
judgment, have been much twisted from their true 
significance by neglecting to take into account 
those other words of His own, " It is the spirit that 
quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing; "4 or, as 
St. Paul has it, " The letter killeth, the spirit 
giveth life." ^ Stripped of such qualification, 
the commands, " Give to him that asketh thee," ^ 
" Resist not evil," ^ would, even in individual con- 

* S. Matthew, xxi, 12 ; S. Mark, xi, 15 ; S. Luke, xix, 45 ; S. 
John, ii, 15. 

'^ S. Luke, xiii, 32. 

^ S. Matthew, xxiii, 33. 

* S. John, vi, 63. 

' 2. Corinthians, iii, 6. 

* S. Matthew, v, 42. 
^ S. Matthew, v, 39. 



io6 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

duct, in the present imperfect conditions of the 
world, result in transferring all property to the 
idle and all control to the vicious. 

Our Lord's utterances against the use of force 
would, I apprehend, be found to fall under two 
principal divisions, the exemplars of which would 
be: (i) " Resist not evil, him that will take thy 
coat forbid not to take thy cloak also; " ' and, (2) 
''Put up thy sword within its sheath,"' "My 
kingdom is not of this world." ^ 

As regards non-resistance to evil, it seems to 
me certain that these commands, at most, are to 
the individual Christian, as concerning his own 
individual rights and their vindication. There 
is in them no warrant to surrender the rights of 
another, still less if he is the trustee of those 
rights. This applies with double emphasis to 
rulers, and to nations; for these, in this matter, 
have no personal rights. They are guardians, 
trustees, and as such are bound to do their best, 
even to the use of force, if need be, for the rightful 
interest of their wards. 

Personally I go farther, and maintain that the 

' S. Matthew, v. 39-41. 
^ S. John, xviii, ii. 
^ S. John, xviii, 36 



I 



War from the Christian Standpoint 107 

possession of power is a talent committed in trust, 
for which account will be exacted ; ^ and that, under 
some circumstances, an obligation to repress evil 
external to its borders rests upon a nation, as 
surely as responsibility for the slums rests upon the 
rich quarters of a city. In this respect I call to 
witness Armenia, Crete, and Cuba; without, 
however, presuming myself to judge the con- 
sciences of the nations who witnessed without 
intervention the sufferings of the first two. 

On the point before us: As regards the use of 
force in municipal regulation, St. Paul is explicit : 
'^ The ruler beareth not the sword in vain, for 
he is a minister of God, an avenger to execute 
wrath upon him that doeth evil."^ But if the 
evil-doer, through numbers or otherwise, is strong 
enough to oppose effective resistance, is the ruler 
then to sheathe his sword? Assuredly not, in 
principle; and in practice only if conscience 
affirms that it is best for the state. Here you have 
War, — internal war ; civil war perhaps, or a mob 
ruling the city. If, now, the evil-doer — the 
aggressor, or the oppressor — be not within your 
borders, but without, in what is the variation of 

* S. Matthew, xxv, 14-29. 

* Romans, xiii, 4. 



io8 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

principle? The sword again must defend the 
right, and you have external War. 

Suffering follows : wounds, death, bereavement, 
economical distress, anxieties multifold. Con- 
cerning these things, they are a large part of the 
account; but awful as they are, and to be taken 
into account, they are not the essence of the 
matter. Shall the nation do right, and suffer? 
or do wrong, and be at ease? What would be 
the answer of Him who commanded not to fear 
the destruction of the body, as compared with that 
of the soul ? Is militarism really more deadening 
to the spirit than commercialism ? or than legalism ? 

As regards the utterances of our Lord which 
apparently discourage resort to force : " Put up 
thy sword," and " My kingdom is not of this 
world, for if it were then would my servants fight," 
they have doubtless had upon the minds of men 
an effect that is in direction just; but dispropor- 
tioned, and disregardful also of qualifying words 
and circumstances. 

The close of our Lord^s career on earth intro- 
duced into the energizing of the Christian dispen- 
sation changes of a momentous character, to which 
He frequently alludes. Thus, before His passion, 
" / was not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the 



I 



War from the Christian Standpoint 109 

house of Israel;"' after His resurrection, "Go 
ye J and make disciples of all the nations." * Again, 
*^ Unless I depart, the Comforter will not come 
unto you ; " ^ this, with all the far-reaching conse- 
quences of the coming of the Holy Ghost, is famil- 
iar to us all. We are less apt to remark, but it 
bears strongly on the subject of War from the 
Christian standpoint, the strictly analogous utter- 
ance : " Now, he that hath no sword, let him sell 
his cloak and buy one ; for, the things concerning 
Me have an end." 4 The spiritual things concern- 
ing Him ended not then, nor since; but, unless 
the sword was to be bought for ornament, not for 
use, the use of it in the approaching stage of His 
dispensation is recognized, — nay, authorized. 
Those who have read Mozley's " Ruling Ideas in 
Early Ages," may recall the just emphasis laid by 
him upon the necessity, not merely of permitting, 
but of enjoining practices which the present times 
require, yet which after times under the guidance of 
God may outgrow ; explicitly the personal obliga- 
tion of the individual Avenger of Blood. Our 
Lord, contemplating His death, did not merely 

' S. Matthew, xv, 24 ; Romans, xv, 8. 

* S. Matthew, xxviii, 19. 
^ S. John, xvi, 7. 

* S. Luke, xxii, 36,37. 



no Some Neglected Aspects of War 

countenance, but commanded the provision of 
the sword, and with it, by legitimate implication, 
the use of it. St. Peter, by misunderstanding of 
our Lord's purpose and necessary death, and 
prematurely — because the end was not yet — 
used the sword wrongfully, and was rebuked ; ' 
but the general command was not rescinded. 

Further, the full force of this remarkable com- 
mand will scarcely be realized, unless we view it 
in connection with the reference which He Him- 
self made to its antecedents. " When I sent you 
without purse, and scrip, and shoes,'' lacked ye 
anything? And they said, nothing. Then said 
He unto them. But now, he that hath a purse let 
him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that 
hath no sword, let him sell his cloak and buy one ; 
for the things concerning Me have an end." ^ 

On the first mission of the Twelve, under the 
dispensation of His presence in the flesh, our Lord 
had specially directed them to go without the 
preparations which men ought normally to make 
as a matter of mere prudent provision ; they were 
then to rely, under the dispensation of the moment, 

* S. John, xviii, lo, ii; S. Matthew, xxvi, 52-54. 
'^ S. Luke, X, 4 ; S. Matthew, x, 9, 10. 
' S. Luke, xxii, 35-37. 



War from the Christian Standpoint iii 

upon a Providential care beyond the common — 
supernatural. On this second occasion He directs 
them to neglect no ordinary precaution, but, for 
the probable emergencies of life, to rely upon 
usual human provisions. Among these, by express 
command of the sword. He clearly recognizes the 
need of, and sanctions the resort to, self-defense 
by arms ; and that in the fullest sense consistent 
with righteousness. Nor is it without significance 
that He places the need of the sword before that of 
a garment; useful, if not indispensable. And 
again, it is not without significance that the 
authority of the sword and the gift of the Holy 
Ghost coincide in date; for with the Holy Ghost 
comes the illumination of the Christian conscience, 
to which the power of the sword can securely be 
committed. 

As regards the words, " My kingdom is not of 
this world," they are, if rightly understood, as 
true now as ever. St. Paul after the Lord's 
departure reaffirmed, " The weapons of our war- 
fare are not carnal.'" In physical coercion of 
material evil the sword acts within its sphere ; it 
has no power over intellect, or moral assent, nor 
should it dare to assume such power. Attention, 

' 2 Corinthians, x, 3,4. 



112 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

however, fails to observe that our Lord's con- 
secutive expression accepts without impHcation 
of rebuke the probable course of an earthly 
state, confined, in redressing evil, to earthly 
weapons. " If My kingdom were of this world 
then would My servants fight, that I should 
not be delivered unto the Jews." ^ Every in- 
dependent state is a kingdom of this world. Its 
subjects, or citizens, if confronted by the prospect 
of innocent blood being shed, or of their Ruler 
being slain (their government destroyed), are 
justified in resisting by force. Material evil-doing 
would be met by physical force, and our Lord 
intimates no condemnation. He who knew all 
things, and could at will summon twelve legions of 
angels, ' understood what the case demanded, and 
could properly refrain from what after all, had 
He summoned them, would have been the use of 
force supernatural; just as He abstained in His 
temptation from supplying His wants by His 
supernatural power. ^ He willed at His betrayal 
to allow violent evil to work its will ; for He and 
He alone, then knew that in the counsels of God it 

1 S. John, xviii, 36. 

* S. Matthew, xxvi, 53. 

* S. Matthew, iv, 3-7. 



War from the Christian Standpoint 113 

was determined that that was the hour of the 
Powers of Darkness.' 

Such knowledge we do not possess. We have 
our natural faculties; we have the revelation of 
God's will in the Bible ; and we have the promise 
of the Holy Ghost for guidance. We have, further, 
the sword committed to us for a present distress, 
which in the recent light of Armenia, of Cuba, and 
of China, it is not too much to affirm has not yet 
passed away. These are our leading data ; upon 
which, as to action, conscience must reach its 
decision, and issue its mandates. 

If I am asked what are we to think when two 
consciences, both presumably equally honest and 
Christian, reach opposed conclusions as to right 
and wrong, I am not concerned, in reply, to give 
definitions. It is sufficient in such cases simply 
to recognize the fact, upon which turns all St. 
Paul's argument in Romans xiv. : " To him who 
accounteth anything to be unclean, to him it is 
unclean." Such a one, individual or nation, must 
obey his conscience. To this dilemma of con- 
science as to War, Peace presents a close analogy 
of its own. In the Providence of God, or through 
the weakness of man, the most successful govern- 

' S. Luke, xxii, 53. 



114 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

ment is that carried on by communities of free 
men, of which it is a commonplace that a healthy 
opposition, the clash of parties, conscientiously 
differing, is an inevitable feature. The why of 
this may be an interesting philosophical specula- 
tion; but for practical purposes we need only to 
recognize the fact. The case is precisely analogous 
to that of two nations warring for a principle ; of 
which our own history furnishes an illustration in 
the war between the North and the South. The 
marriages most successful in the development of 
a complete union are doubtless those where the 
virtues of one complement the defects of the 
other; but in such cases there is necessarily 
counter-action as well as accord. Honest collision 
is evidently a law of progress, however we explain 
its origin ; whether that be in the ordinance of God, 
or in the imperfection of man. 



THE CAPTURE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY 

AT SEA 



THE CAPTURE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY 

AT SEA 

By Julian S. Corbett 

The Nineteenth Century and After ^ June^ 1907 

** A S things stand at present," writes Professor 
l^M. Perels in the last edition of his Interna- 
tionale Seerecht, " we caijnot count on the exemp- 
tion of private property at sea from capture in 
the near future. The main factor is that the 
British Government since the Declaration of Paris 
has maintained an attitude of persistent and 
determined resistance to all movements for reform- 
ing the laws of maritime warfare." Publicists of 
almost all countries, including our own, have been 
expressing themselves in similar terms, and we 
are warned by some of our best international 
lawyers that there is growing up abroad a mass of 
hostile opinion on the subject which it is unsafe 
for us to ignore. Professor Perels' words con- 
veniently focus for us that alleged mass of opinion, 



ii8 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

and since he was formerly Admiralitatsrath and 
is now Departements Direktor in Reichs-Marine 
Amt and Professor in the Berhn University, we 
may take his formula as something like our official 
arraignment at the bar of Europe. But before 
examining the charge with a view to preparing 
a defence it is wise at once to enter a claim to vary 
the indictment. We do not deny the " persistent 
and determined resistance." We merely beg to 
submit that our " persistent and determined 
resistance " has been *^ to all movements for re- 
forming the laws of maritime warfare in the 
interests of the great military S tales. ^^ 

It is true that some of our most respected au- 
thorities would persuade us that the exemption 
of private property at sea from capture is particu- 
larly to our own interests, because we possess the 
largest, and therefore, as they assume, the most 
vulnerable mercantile marine, and because we 
rely for our sustenance more than any other nation 
on seaborne supplies. But this is a military 
question, on which our publicists are not safe 
guides. It involves strategical considerations, 
which clearly they have not taken into account, 
and their view is not shared by the Navy. It 
is a view, however, which is seriously urged by 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 119 

serious people, and we must return to it. For the 
present it is enough to claim that the leading facts 
in the history of the movement create a prima 
facie case that exemption is for the benefit of 
weak fleets and powerful armies. Started origi- 
nally by a French abbe, the idea was first embodied 
in a treaty by Frederick the Great, a man who had 
had practical experience of how gravely the vulner- 
ability of commerce at sea may affect the progress 
of a Continental war. When he was in alliance 
with Great Britain it did not occur to him to make 
the suggestion. It was the newborn Republic of 
America that proposed il to him; and he wisely 
agreed, since the arrangement made it impossible 
for the United States ever to make war on him at 
all. Similarly, the United States was wise to get 
the sanction of so great a figure to the principle 
of immunity, since her budding commerce was 
always at the mercy of her one enemy so long as 
capture was permitted. With material advantages 
so great and obvious in hand it can convince no- 
body to talk of lofty and disinterested ideals. 

Next it was Napoleon who put forward the new 
doctrine, and sought to establish it by the revo- 
lutionary violence of his " Continental System." 
In 1866, Austria, cooped up in the head of the 



I20 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

Adriatic by the menace of a superior Italian fleet, 
declared for it. Italy, similarly threatened by 
France, had already done so. Again, in 1870 
Prussia magnanimously intimated that, true to 
the sublime principles of Frederick the Great, 
it was her intention, whatever France did, to treat 
as sacred all innocent private property at sea. 

When the buffalo found the lion in his path, 
he exclaimed, with a superb gesture, ^' For my 
part, I mean to remain true to my vegetarian 
principles." 

Now to examine the charge more seriously and 
with what temper we can. For it must be under- 
stood that our friends abroad make their accusa- 
tion opprobriously. We are represented as stand- 
ing in the way of human progress, of obstructing 
for our own selfish ends the march of civilization, of 
seeking to perpetuate the methods of barbarism, 
of thwarting the disinterested aspirations of nobler 
nations to mitigate the severity of war and human- 
ize its practice. And all this because, as they say, 
we refuse to complete the work of the Declaration 
of Paris by consenting to give to private property 
at sea that complete sanctity which it is unblush- 
ingly alleged to enjoy in warfare on land. So 
shocking does such depravity sound that in many 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 121 

cases our serious and high-minded journahsm, 
which is so dear to us, is beginning to ask, in its 
most moving and conscientious tones, if we are 
to be the last of all nations to recognize this sacred 
duty to humanity. 

Were it not that this particular attitude towards 
the question was so ludicrous it would be difficult 
to treat it with patience. Such a charge against 
ourselves is peculiarly hard, seeing that we have 
to our credit a record in respect of the mitigation 
of war which no nation can pretend to rival. There 
is no nation that can point to such a concession 
to the public opinion of the world against interest 
as we made in consenting, in 1856, to the doctrine 
of " Free ships, free goods." At the time it was 
widely regarded, and is still so regarded, as de- 
priving us of one of the most powerful weapons in 
our armory; and yet for the sake of goodwill 
amongst nations, for the sake of softening the 
hardships of war to neutrals, we surrendered 
that right. For centuries we had clung to it as 
essential to the maintenance of our sea power ; yet 
a higher and more farsighted wisdom pressed for 
the almost quixotic sacrifice, and it was done. Can 
any nation show a sacrifice beside it? Let him 
who can cast the first stone at us now. 



122 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

To add to the unreasonableness of our accusers, 
instead of acknowledging handsomely the lengths 
to which we went on that occasion, they rail at 
us because we will not extend the principle to the 
complete immunity of private property at sea. As 
though the one principle had anything to do with 
the other. " You might as well say,'^ said Sir 
William Harcourt during a debate on the 
point in 1878 — and surely he, whether as a 
Liberal humanitarian or an international lawyer, 
should carry weight enough — " You might as 
well say that the extension of the Great Western 
Railway would be an extension of the Great North- 
ern. They do not go in the same direction, they 
have not the same object, they are not parallel 
in any respect.'' Nothing can serve better for 
clearing the subject of fallacies and exhibiting 
the true grounds of the British attitude than to 
follow out the line of reasoning which the great 
international jurist indicated in opposing the idea 
on that occasion. 

If the ideas which determined the status of 
private property in war be traced back to the 
dawn of modern international law, we shall find 
Grotius, in 1625, and Bynkershoek a century later, 
giving as an axiom the right to confiscate or destroy 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 123 

all property whatsoever belonging to an enemy 
wherever found. The axiom was quickly modified 
by Vattel, who wrote during the Seven Years' 
War. While admitting the abstract right, he 
maintained that its exercise should only be per- 
mitted as far as it is called for by the purposes of 
war. Here we have the first application of the 
true theory of war to the question. We make 
war not for the purpose of doing the enemy all 
the harm we can, but to bring such pressure to bear 
upon him as will force him to do our will — that 
is, will convince him that to make peace on our 
terms is better than continuing to fight. Now, 
the indiscriminate plunder of private property and 
its wanton destruction, while causing an immense 
amount of individual suffering, do not contribute 
in the most forcible way to the kind of pressure 
that is needed. Consequently, it had already 
become the practice for an invading enemy to 
treat private property with a certain respect, or 
rather, perhaps, economy, and to endeavor to 
set some restraint upon its indiscriminate plunder 
and destruction. 

It is to this movement is due the oft repeated 
but wholly unfounded assertion that private 
property ashore, unlike private property at sea, 



124 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

has been made generally immune from capture. 
It is further asserted that this immunity was due 
to a growing sense of humanity and a Christian 
desire to mitigate the horrors of war. Now, this 
is the kind of assertion which makes plain and 
practical people impatient with international law 
and blinds them to its value and reality. It is 
just one of those expressions which jurists let slip 
from a mere habit of the pen. Of this particular 
statement, that the restrictions in question were 
due to a growing sense of humanity, there is no 
real evidence whatever. Humanity may have been 
a contributory cause, but, if we turn from the loose 
expressions of jurists to the dry light of the orders 
actually promulgated by invading generals, we 
see at once that the real reason of the restrictions 
was strategical and military, and not moral at all. 
Take, for instance, the earliest case as typical — 
the rule of Gustavus Adolphus against plunder- 
ing: "If it is so please God that we beat the 
enemy either in the field or in his leaguer, then 
shall every man follow the chase of the enemies; 
and no man give himself up to fall upon the pillage 
so long as it is possible to follow the enemy, '^ 
etc. This germ idea that pillage actually lessens 
your power to exert the necessary pressure was 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 125 

further developed by the rules of Frederick the 
Great ; but he took a long step further. For that 
great master of war recognized not only that 
pillage demoralized and weakened the weapon 
with which the pressure had to be exerted, but that 
pillage and destruction were not the most profitable 
or effective ways of exercising your rights over the 
enemy's property. To deprive the enemy's people 
of their power to produce was both to destroy the 
value of your conquest and its power of maintain- 
ing your troops. To protect the goose and enable 
her to continue laying her golden eggs was the 
only sound policy. He therefore insisted on the 
method of exercising his war right by levying 
contributions and making requisitions. By this 
means he at once maintained the temper of his 
weapon and made the pressure of the occupation 
more lasting, more powerful, and more directly 
coercive to the collective life of the enemy. To 
say that he abandoned his right over enemy's 
property is to play with words. " If an army is in 
winter quarters in an enemy's country," he writes 
in his General Principles of War, " the soldiers 
receive gratis bread, meat, and beer, which are 
furnished by the country." And again: "The 
enemy's country is bound to supply horses for the 



126 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

artillery, munitions of war, and provisions, and 
to make up any deficiencies of money.'' The 
truth is that no restraint of the old rule of Grotius 
and Bynkershoek is to be found that does not oper- 
ate to the military or strategical benefit of the 
belligerent, not one that does not directly increase 
the pressure which the invading force is seeking 
to exert to achieve its end. The principle reached 
its clearest expression during the Franco-German 
war, where it was absolutely essential to German 
success that they should not goad the French 
people into guerilla warfare, as Napoleon had done 
in Spain, by permitting irresponsible exercise of 
belligerent rights over private property. By the 
German orders of 1870 no requisition could be 
made except by general officers or officers in com- 
mand of detached corps. 

The system worked admirably, and, on the 
whole, as mercifully and with as little individual 
suffering as is possible in war. The object of an 
invasion — the means by which it exerts the neces- 
sary pressure — is to produce a stagnation of 
national life. This the German invasion did effect- 
ively, and the stagnation grew deeper and more 
intolerable the more it was prolonged, till submis- 
sion was recognized to be the lesser evil. But 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 127 

all this was not done merely by the victories of 
armies. It was done by the exercise of belligerent 
rights over enemy's property : of the right to seize 
and consume it; of the right to control roads and 
railways and inland waters, so as to prevent its 
flow and render commerce impossible except in so 
far as it suited the belligerent ; and of the right to 
carry military execution against it in case of resist- 
ance by its owners. Without the right to requisi- 
tions and contributions, without the right to con- 
trol civil communications, it could not be done. 
War, as is universally admitted, would become 
impossible. Nations cannot be brought to their 
knees by the mere conflict of armies, any more than 
they can by the single combats of kings. It is 
what follows victory that counts — the choking of 
the national life by process of execution on prop- 
erty, the stagnation produced by the stoppage of 
civil communications, whether public or private. 
Here is a picture of what the process meant, 
drawn by the able pen of a man who saw it face 
to face in 1870: 

" In occupied towns officials receive no salaries, 
professional men no fees. The law courts are 
closed. Holders of house property can get no 



128 Some Neglected Aspects oj War 

rent. Holders of land can neither get rent, nor 
can they cultivate the soil or sell their crops. 
The State funds pay no dividends, or, if they do, 
all communication between occupied and unoccu- 
pied districts being broken off, the dividends can- 
not be touched. Railway dividends are equally 
intangible, and perhaps the line on which the 
shareholder has especially counted is in the hands 
of the enemy." 

This is what conquest of territory means — 
the prostration of the national life; and this is 
why conquest of territory is the means by which 
land warfare seeks to gain its end. 

With this picture in our minds of the way in 
which private property is dealt with ashore, and 
the way in which it is made to contribute to the 
victor's object, let us turn to the sea, and inquire 
in what manner its treatment there is less moral, 
less human, or less necessary, if war is to be waged 
at all. To begin with, we note that in some 
respects private property has never been so badly 
treated at sea as it has been on land ; at least, in 
modern times and in regular warfare it has never 
been the subject of indiscriminate plunder. The 
ruthless scramble for loot, which led to the acutest 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 129 

suffering and cruelty ashore, was no part of sea 
capture. Prizes were taken by orderly act of 
war, were regularly condemned, and the proceeds 
divided amongst the captors in cool blood and by 
authority. Again, at sea immediate military exe- 
cution was never the penalty for resisting inter- 
ference with private property, as it always was, 
and in some cases still is, ashore. The real reason 
why capture at sea got a bad name was due to 
privateers, by whom the greater part of it was done, 
and who in some areas, and particularly in the 
Mediterranean, were often guilty of unspeakable 
horrors. The evil was early recognized by Great 
Britain, and during the Seven Years' War an Act 
was passed forbidding the granting of commissions 
to vessels under a certain tonnage, in order to 
ensure that the work should be done by respectable 
merchant captains, and not by mere smugglers 
and pirates. It is not, of course, pretended that 
this law was made from merely philanthropic 
reasons, any more than was our concession about 
" free ships, free goods.'' Though a sense of 
honor did enter into it, the chief reason was that 
we found ourselves unable to control the lawless- 
ness of small privateers, and felt that neutrals, 
whom we did not wish to exasperate, had a legiti- 



130 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

mate cause of complaint. Now the abuse is no 
longer possible, since the Declaration of Paris 
abolished privateering. Over and above this 
great mitigation of the hardships of warfare against 
private property at sea, there must also be taken 
into consideration the spread of the practice of 
marine insurance, which now distributes the 
initial loss by individuals over the general capital 
of the nation. The result is that even the most 
convinced advocates of the change, both at home 
and abroad, admit that the argument from inhu- 
manity is untenable. The Lord Chancellor, him- 
self our strongest advocate of reform, has plainly 
declared that " no operation of war inflicts less 
suffering than the capture of unarmed vessels at 
sea." 

The truth is that the sea service, in demanding 
the retention of its right to general capture, asks 
no more than what is universally granted to the 
land service. It asks no more than to exercise 
war rights over property in so far as, in the words 
of Vattel, it is called for by the purposes of war — 
in so far as the pressure necessary to bring peace 
cannot be exerted without it. It asks only to be 
allowed to produce that stagnation of the enemy's 
life at sea which an army is permitted to produce 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 131 

ashore by conquest of territory. And how can 
such stagnation be produced? Not by conquest, 
for conquest of the sea is impossible. The sea 
cannot be the subject of ownership. You cannot 
do more, however complete your ascendency, 
than deprive your enemy of his use of the sea ; you 
can do no more than deny him that part of his 
national Hfe which moves and has its being on the 
sea. This is what we mean when we speak of 
" command of the sea," and not " conquest of the 
sea.'' The value of the sea internationally is as 
a means of communication between States and 
parts of States, and the use and enjoyment of 
these communications is the actual life of a nation 
at sea. The sea can be nothing else, except a 
fishing-ground, and fishing is comparatively so 
small a factor in war nowadays that it may be 
eliminated from the question. All, then, that we 
can possibly gain from our enemy upon the sea 
is to deny him its use and enjoyment as a means 
of communication. Command of the sea means 
nothing more nor less than control of communica- 
tions. It occupies exactly the same place and 
discharges the same function in maritime warfare 
that conquest and occupation of territory does in 
land warfare. If one is lawful and necessary, 



132 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

so is the other; if both are lawful and necessary, 
then each connotes the legality and necessity of 
the means by which alone the condition of stagna- 
tion can be brought about. 

At sea this condition is produced by deahng 
with private property on exactly the same principle 
as on land — that is to say, in the most economical 
and effective manner. By its capture and con- 
version to the use of the navy we make it contribute 
directly to the force and economy of our weapon, 
and by an orderly system of prize regulations we 
do it without in any way demoralizing our per- 
sonnel or goading the enemy's people to irregular 
retahation. By no other means can we do what 
ashore is done by contributions and requisitions — 
that is, by no other means can we make enemy's 
property serve to a merciful and speedy end to 
hostilities. By this means also we control the 
enemy's communications, we paralyze his sea- 
borne commerce, we sever him from his outlying 
territory. By no other means can we mercifully 
and effectively deprive him of all the sea can give 
him, and produce the state of stagnation of his 
maritime life that conquest of territory does of 
his life ashore. By the victories of fleets alone it 
can no more be done than by the victories of armies. 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 133 

If, then, in this way we test the doctrine of im- 
munity of private property in the cold hght of the 
theory of war — if we keep in mind that war 
consists of two phases — firstly, the destruction of 
the enemy's armed forces, and, secondly, of pres- 
sure on the population to produce stagnation of 
national life, we see the answer to our great 
military neighbors is complete. When they ask 
us to abandon the right of capture of private 
property at sea — of dealing with it, that is, in the 
most merciful and effective way for achieving the 
purposes of war — we reply. We will do so when 
you abandon the right of requisition and contribu- 
tion. And when they ask us, as in effect they do, 
to give up the right of controlling sea communica- 
tions, we reply, We will do so when you give up 
the right to control roads, railways, and inland 
waters. If they go further — as they fairly may — 
and ask, " What about the hardship of detaining 
the crews of captured merchantmen ? " we answer, 
" We will abandon that means of stopping your 
commerce also, when you abandon forced labor 
of the civil population ashore." It is all a reductio 
ad ahsurdum. Without the exercise of such rights 
both conquest of territory and command of the 
sea become nugatory and war impossible. 



134 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

But our opponents may reply, We do not ask 
you to give up control of communications. We 
would leave you commercial blockade. But is 
this what they mean? It is true that many of 
them except commercial blockade from their 
claim, but what the Lord Chancellor demands is 
entire exemption of private property, " unless 
really contraband or its place of destination be a 
beleaguered fortress.'' This, of course, amounts 
to a complete prohibition of our right to control 
communications except for the purpose of destroy- 
ing the enemy's armed forces. It prohibits it 
for the purpose of the secondary process of pres- 
sure, and is entirely inadmissible. The Chan- 
cellor's meaning is at least perfectly clear. What 
is difficult to believe is that those who express 
themselves less roundly can really mean anything 
else. Let us examine what the position of these 
men leads to. In effect they say. We admit your 
abstract right to capture private property at sea, 
but deny that its general capture on the high seas 
is necessary for the purposes of war. This point 
of view is so plausible that it has highly commended 
itself to our own advocates of immunity. Ignor- 
ing the whole theory of maritime warfare, that it 
is a mere question of controlling communications, 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 135 



they argue as though all we could gain from gen- 
eral capture on the high seas is the paltry value 
of the goods seized. It was just Lord Granville's 
attitude at the momentous meeting of the Secret 
Committee of the Council on the eve of the Seven 
Years' War, when, on the question of whether 
admirals at sea should be ordered to seize French 
merchantmen, he declared he was against ^^ vex- 
ing your neighbors for a little muck." If we 
regard the mere value of the property captured, 
this is true enough. It represents no more than 
the captor's attempt to subsist his fleet on the sea 
he commands, as ashore an army is subsisted on the 
territory it conquers. But the attempt never leads 
to much. The best we can do at sea by a complete 
conversion of all we can lay hands on is but a 
trifle compared with what is gained ashore by 
the process of contribution, requisition and forced 
labor. It is, indeed, not a little hard that the 
military Powers should scold us for nibbling this 
sorry crust when they habitually gorge themselves 
on baskets of loaves. 

But though intrinsically the capture of property 
on the high seas has an almost negligible military 
value, as a deterrent its value is beyond measure. 
For it is an essential part of the process of destroy- 



136 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

ing the enemy's commerce by control of sea com- 
munication. Blockade alone — even if blockade 
in the old sense were still possible — will not do. 
In their best days blockades were never thoroughly 
effective. It is the feeling that a ship and her 
cargo are never safe from capture from port to 
port that is the real deterrent, which breaks the 
heart of merchants and kills their enterprise. But 
this is a point on which all may not agree. It 
matters little, for it is not the one that is fatal to 
our reformers' claim. 

The fatal point is this — that if you admit the 
only form of blockade that is possible under 
present conditions, and refuse the right of general 
capture, you establish a law so unfairly advan- 
tageous to Great Britain that no other Power could 
possibly be expected to assent to it, and we our- 
selves would certainly not have the effrontery to 
propose it. 

The current conception of effective blockade 
is that agreed upon between England and Russia 
in 1801 : the port blockaded must be watched by 
ships anchored before it or stationed sufficiently 
near to make egress or ingress obviously dangerous. 
All countries have adopted this idea. But this was 
before the days of torpedoes. The idea was, "as 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 137 

actually expressed in certain Dutch treaties, that 
the blockading ships should be as close in as was 
compatible with safety from the enemy's coast 
defence. The defence in those days was guns. 
But what now of mobile defence ? Is a blockading 
fleet entitled to be so far out as to be beyond 
torpedo-boat or destroyer range? If so it must 
be completely out of sight, and egress and ingress 
cannot be manifestly dangerous, and the blockad- 
ing squadron must be cruising far from the port 
and far from territorial waters. If such distant 
and invisible blockade is not to be recognized as 
effective, then effective blockade is now impossible, 
and no means of controlling sea communications 
remains except general capture. It follows, then, 
that if the Continental Powers admit our right 
to control communication and deny us general 
capture, they must recognize such distant blockade 
as effective and lawful. 

Now let us see how the law would work. In the 
case of war with France (which, being the most 
unlikely one, may be taken with least offence), it 
would be admissible for us to station a squadron, 
say, off Yarmouth and stretch a chain of cruisers 
from the Lizard to Cape Ortegal, and declare a 
blockade of the whole of the French Atlantic 



138 Some Neglected Aspects of War 



and Channel ports. Then, after due notice, every 
neutral and every Frenchman leaving a French 
port or consigned to one that appeared on the 
scene would be liable to be captured and sent in 
for judgment for attempted breach of blockade. 
The same liability, moreover, by the law of ultimate 
destination, would attach to such ships in transitu 
in any part of the world. In the case of Russia 
or Germany a similar situation could be set up 
still more easily, assuming we had once obtained 
a working command of the sea. On the other 
hand, it would be practically impossible for all 
these three Powers combined to set up such a 
situation against us; unless, indeed, in the unim- 
aginable eventuality of their being relatively 
strong enough to maintain a blockading chain from 
Finisterre through the Faroes to the coast of Nor- 
way. It is a pure question of geography. If, 
then, the doctrine of permitting blockade in its 
sole possible form and refusing general capture 
were adopted, we could always paralyze the 
ocean -borne commerce of any of the great military 
Powers, while they, being unable to blockade 
effectively, and not being allowed to make prizes 
on the high seas, could not possibly touch ours. 
It is not to be believed that your well-meaning 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 139 

advocates of justice between nations can really 
intend an arrangement so grossly unjust. Clearly 
there is but one alternative — either you must 
leave the law as it is, or adopt the candid proposal 
of the Chancellor and abolish capture of private 
property altogether, saving only contraband and 
military blockade. And what the Chancellor's 
proposal would mean must be kept clearly in mind. 
It would permit us to deal with private property 
for the purpose of overpowering the armed force 
of the enemy, and deny us the right to use it for 
reaping the fruit of success. 

Turning now from the Continental Powers to 
America, we find that the best naval opinion there 
is entirely with us. The contention on which we 
rely is really this — that the right to capture 
merchantmen and their cargoes does not depend 
on the primitive right over enemy's property so 
much as on the right and necessity of controlling 
our enemy's communications. Let us see how it 
is treated by Captain Mahan, who, above all men, 
by his genius and learning is entitled to give 
judgment. His declaration is the more remarkable 
because America has always been the most promi- 
nent champion of immunity and the most ardently 
convinced that in advocating the reform she was 



I40 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

upholding the cause of civilization, humanity, and 
justice. This belief with the mass of the people 
has survived her taking rank as a great naval 
Power, and must be treated with respect. For all 
their practical plain sense the Americans are 
idealists at heart, more so, perhaps, than any other 
people, and it therefore required no little courage 
and the deepest conviction for Captain Mahan to 
stand up and tell his countrymen their feeling of 
magnanimity was false, mistaken, and contrary to 
plain sense and justice. Yet so he does in his 
latest work The War of 1812^ calmly, cogently, 
and without flinching. In that work he discloses a 
ripe study of the theory of war which none of his 
others contain in the same degree — and for the 
full development of that theory, be it remembered, 
we are indebted mainly to the Germans themselves 
— and here is the result of its application to the 
question before us : 

" The claim for private property [he says] . . . 
involves a play upon words, to the confusion of 
ideas, which from that time [that is, from Na- 
poleon's Continental System] to this has vitiated 
the arguments upon which have been based a 
prominent feature of American policy. Private 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 141 

property at a standstill ... is the unproductive 
money in a stocking hid in a closet. Property 
belonging to private individuals, but embarked 
in the process of transportation and exchange, 
which we call commerce, is like money in circula- 
tion. It is the life-blood of national prosperity, 
on which war depends, and as such is national 
in its employment, and only in ownership private. 
To stop such circulation is to sap national 
prosperity, and to sap prosperity, on which 
war depends for its energy, is a measure 
as truly military as is killing of the men 
whose arms maintain war in the field. Prohibi- 
tion of commerce is enforced at will when an 
enemy's army holds a territory. If permitted it 
inures to the benefit of the conqueror. ... It 
will not be doubted that, should a prohibition on 
shore be disregarded, the offending property 
would be seized as punishment. . . . The seizure 
of enemy's merchant ships and goods for violating 
the prohibition against their engaging in com- 
merce is what is commonly called the seizure of 
private property. Under the methods of the last 
two centuries it has been in administration a 
process as regular legally as is libelling a ship for 
an action in damages; nor does it differ from it in 



142 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

principle. The point at issue is not ' Is the 
property private ? ' but ^ Is the method conductive 
to the purposes of war ? * Property strictly 
private on board ship, but not in process of cir- 
culation, is for this reason never touched, and to 
do so is considered as disgraceful as a common 
theft." 

He then proceeds to justify on these grounds the 
consistent attitude of the British Government, 
and to remind his countrymen that, had their 
ideas prevailed in 1861, there could have been no 
blockade of the Southern coast and the Union 
could only have been maintained at the cost of 
hundreds of thousands more Hves, if, indeed, it 
could have been maintained at all. 

It is easy, of course, to dismiss Captain Mahan's 
theory of private property at sea being national 
in its employment as mere casuistry, but that will 
not serve. The truth it expresses will remain. 
We have a moral and indefeasible right at sea as 
well as on land to prohibit and stop, so far as we 
can without cruelty or unnecessary hardship, 
the flow of enemy's commerce, on which her 
resources for war depend as truly as they do upon 
armies and fleets. If private men in the face of 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 143 

this admitted right choose to ignore the state of 
war and still embark their property in commerce, 
they do so with their eyes open and must not 
complain of the consequences. Let them keep 
their property quiet at home and it will not be 
touched — at least by the sea service. 

There still remains to be dealt with the argument 
upon which our own idealists chiefly rely. It is 
an argument to which allusion has been made 
already, but has nothing to do with morality, 
justice, or humanity. For though it is obvious 
between the lines that our advocates of reform 
are as sincerely moved as the Americans by an 
ideal of Christian progress, Briton-like they do 
not talk about it. With us such things are felt, 
not spoken. We prefer to offer material, selfish 
reasons for the faith that is in us, and consequently 
our idealists argue that the recognition of the 
sanctity of private property at sea would be a 
distinct military advantage to ourselves, and, 
moreover, as is also usual in such cases, that if 
we do not seize the opportunity to recognize it 
now it will not occur again. " I trust," says the 
Lord Chancellor, referring to President Roose- 
velt^s proposal to have the thing settled at the 
coming Hague Conference: 



144 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

" I trust that his Majesty's Government will 
avail themselves of this unique opportunity. 
[How familiar is the phrase ! ] I urge it not upon 
any ground of sentiment or humanity (indeed, no 
operation of war inflicts less suffering than the 
capture of unarmed vessels at sea), but upon the 
ground that on the balance of argument, coolly 
weighed, the interests of Great Britain will gain 
much from a change long and eagerly desired by 
the great majority of other Powers." 

So, then, it is for military reasons that we are 
to consent to have the teeth pulled upon which 
we have relied for so many generations, and to 
" abandon in great measure,'' as Captain Mahan 
has put our case, " the control of the sea, so far 
as useful to war." Let us, then, frankly examine 
these military reasons which the Lord Chancellor 
sets forth for they are not at once convincing. 
Indeed, it is obvious that the Lord Chancellor 
has not brought to bear upon the subject the pro- 
found study of war with which his great predeces- 
sor, Lord Hardwicke, enlightened our councils 
during the Seven Years' War. We might even 
beg seriously that before he gives the weight of his 
high reputation and exalted office any further to 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 145 

the movement he would read and re-read that 
masterly series of letters which the greatest of 
the Chancellors addressed to the Duke of New- 
castle and others during the most successful war 
we ever waged. 

The main military or strategical argument that 
is urged is that, as we have the greatest amount of 
private property afloat, and rely more than anyone 
upon commerce for our resources, we stand to 
lose most by the maintenance of the existing law. 
'' Our merchant marine,'^ says the Chancellor, 
" is vulnerable in proportion to its size and ubi- 
quity.'' This is a tremendous assumption, natural 
enough to one who has made no study of the reali- 
ties of war; but we may venture to assert that it 
is one which our naval staff would certainly hesi- 
tate to endorse. To point out its fallacy com- 
pletely would require a whole excursus on the 
British ideas of commerce protection, and possibly 
the disclosure of matters which the Admiralty had 
better keep to itself. But plain sense will suggest 
difficulties in accepting this very common view. 
Everyone must know that a cruiser's capacity for 
destroying commerce is not unlimited. How very 
limited it is the Chancellor clearly has not well 
considered. A cruiser can scarcely take more 



146 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

than one ship at once, and to overhaul and ascertain 
the nationahty of a ship takes time. She cannot, 
moreover, be in two places at once, and the sea 
is v^ide. To reach a station where she may 
safely begin her operations (unless we have 
entirely lost command of the sea) she will burn 
coal — she will want plenty to get back again; 
the time, consequently, during which she can 
pursue her depredations is very limited indeed. 
These simple matters, so real to naval oflScers, 
are usually ignored by civilians. The broad 
truth is that if we look at the matter from the point 
of view of practical warfare, and not pure mathe- 
matics, we shall see that there is at least a case for 
the opposite of the Chancellor's postulate. The 
greater the bulk of commerce, the more difficult 
does it become to make any serious impression 
upon it. The greater the bulk, the larger will be 
the percentage that is beyond the utmost predatory 
capacity of the enemy's fleet. Thus it is at least 
arguable that the invulnerability of the mass of 
sea-borne commerce increases with its bulk and 
ubiquity. To carry the matter further is impos- 
sible in this place. It must suffice to have pointed 
out that the Chancellor's postulate cannot be 
swallowed whole until it has been well seethed 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 147 

in salt water. In the process it might entirely 
change color. 

Take, again, another similar argument. " The 
principal necessities of England's Navy,*' writes 
Professor Sheldon Amos, " are to protect her 
commerce, defend her coasts, and overpower the 
enemy : it is obvious if the Navy could be reheved 
of any one of these functions, so much the more 
disposable it would be for the efficient discharge 
of the other two." Here, of course, we are even 
further from salt water than with the Chancellor; 
but the passage, teeming as it does with error, has 
been seriously quoted abroad. How do the 
Professor and those who complacently cite him 
imagine that we can defend our coasts without 
defending our trade, or do either without over- 
powering the enemy ? It is all one — all a matter 
of getting control of the common communications. 
Unless and until we do that we have not over- 
powered the enemy, and we have not gone the best 
way about defending our coasts and commerce. 
Casual cruising against our commerce we can 
ignore, if necessary, in the process of getting 
control, so small nowadays is the reach and capac- 
ity of cruisers and so great the bulk of our com- 
merce. As for serious fleet attacks upon it, we 



148 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

can desire nothing better. It is all very well to 
talk of overpowering the enemy, of seeking out the 
enemy's fleet and destroying him, but for this he 
must let you get at him. That was always our 
great difliculty ; and there is no means so good for 
making him expose himself as attacking his com- 
merce with your fleet and tempting him to 
attack yours with his. If our commerce 
were made as sacred from capture as an 
ambassador it would give httle or no relief to our 
battle fleets, while, on the other hand, if we were 
denied the right to attack enemy's commerce we 
should lose the one sure and rapid means of forcing 
his battle fleet to a decision. 

This brings us to the final part of the argument. 
It is freely contended that while the immunity 
of sea-borne commerce would greatly relieve the 
strain of defence, it would scarcely affect our 
power of attack. The grinding power of offence 
which we exercised by attack on commerce in the 
old wars is recognized, or not denied. But it is 
asserted that since Napoleonic times, when these 
wars came to an end, the conditions have entirely 
changed. The change has taken place in two 
ways. Firstly, by the Declaration of Paris we 
are no longer able by general capture to prevent 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 149 

the enemy's commerce being carried in neutral 
ships ; and, secondly, it is contended that the vast 
development of inland communications has made 
Continental nations practically independent of 
sea-borne trade — that is, in so far as exerting 
pressure to compel peace is concerned. Here 
again we have two of those breezy generalizations 
which trip so gaily from the pens of international 
jurists, as though they were not laden and tangled 
with a nexus of practical considerations, complex 
and indeterminate to the last degree, and entirely 
beyond even approximate measurement. They 
seem airily to neglect the fact that the capacity of 
neutral shipping and of inland communications 
is not unlimited, and to ignore the well-known 
difficulty of forcing trade to flow healthily out of 
the channels into which it has settled itself. Neu- 
tral ships are always fairly well full of their own 
business, and if you suddenly throw upon them the 
extra work of even one considerable mercantile 
marine, they will either be unequal to the task or 
freights must leap up to a seriously disturbing 
degree. The case of railways and inland naviga- 
tion is treated with even a less appreciation of what 
actually happens in war. The capacity of rail- 
ways is even less elastic than that of neutral ships. 



150 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

In peace time their carrying capacity, for plain 
reasons of business, is seldom much beyond the 
traffic which accrues in supplying the actual 
necessities of the nation, and to calculate that with 
the intolerable extra strain that is always thrown 
upon them by the paramount exigencies of a great 
war they would still be able to deal with an equiva- 
lent of the normal sea-borne traffic is simply to 
ignore universal experience and the elementary 
facts of commerce. Even were it possible in any 
reasonable time to get land communications to 
bear all their ordinary peace traffic as well as the 
war traffic and that of the paralyzed mercantile 
marine, the dislocation of national hfe and action 
must at least produce so great a shock to trade, 
industry, and, above all, credit as to be a strategical 
blow of the highest order. It is at least a possi- 
bility of drastic offence that we, who are so weak, 
and must always be so weak in the means open to 
the great military Powers, cannot afford to forego. 
I know it is argued by some of our most respected 
and earnest journals that our position and the 
peace of the world would gain a real solidity by 
the sacrifice, and a real motive for the growth of 
armaments would be removed, because we should 
thereby demonstrate that our Navy is meant 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 151 

only for defence. But that is a point incapable 
of demonstration, simply because it is not true. 
Our Navy is under certain circumstances intended 
for offence. Such circumstances, happily, are 
remote, but it is sheer fatuity to think they cannot 
possibly arise. Not only is no real and crushing 
defence possible without attack, but in cases where 
we are the injured party and no redress can be had 
except by war, then direct offence is necessary. 
It is a distasteful subject, above all to the higher 
Liberalism, where the desire to unarm is keenest. 
But it has to be faced, and must be faced without 
false sentiment, as Sir William Harcourt faced it in 
the great debate already cited : 

** There is only one security [he said] for a great 
naval Power : as far as you can and as soon as you 
can to sweep the enemy from the seas. Not only 
must we preserve our right to fight against the 
navy of our enemy, but to capture all the ships 
it possesses and all the means it possesses by which 
we may be attacked. It is the legitimate arm of 
this great Empire — the arm by which we defend 
our extended Empire. I go a great deal farther. 
There is no security in war unless we are strong 
for offence as well as defence." 

It is true. We cannot make ourselves stronger 



152 Some Neglected Aspects 0} War 

for defence or for doing our part in preserving the 
peace of the world by casting away our most 
trenchant and well-approved weapon. It was 
not the custom at King Arthur's Court for his 
knights to equip themselves for their holy quests 
by discarding their spears and trusting to shield 
and dagger. 

In conclusion, it is necessary to enter a protest 
against one other argument, which is too often 
advanced by the advocates of immunity, and par- 
ticularly from commercial centres. Failing to see 
they have involved themselves in a question 
which is mainly one of strategy and war-plans, and 
unable to grasp the force of the naval objection, 
they do not scruple to suggest that the opposition of 
naval officers arises from their desire for prize- 
money. It is to be hoped they scarcely grasp how 
wanton an insult they offer to a great and honor- 
able Service and how deeply the suspicion is 
resented. No one in touch with the ungrudging 
devotion of the modern naval officer could believe 
for one moment that he would permit so sordid a 
consideration even to color the advice he gave his 
country on so high a matter. It is intolerable the 
slander should be repeated as often as it has been. 
Prize-money has nothing whatever to do with the 



Capture of Private Property at Sea 153 

matter. Many officers indeed are of opinion that 
for the good of the Service alone the system should 
be abolished. There might be cases in time of 
war, as there were in days gone by, when prize- 
money might warp a man's sense of duty. There- 
fore, they say, let it go — to whom you will. What 
is good for the Service is good enough for us. 
Chambers of commerce may find difficulty in 
appreciating the depth and reality of the sentiment. 
Could they but do so they would never permit the 
prize-money argument to sully their petitions 
again. The reason why naval officers urge with 
heart and soul the retention of the old right of 
capture is because they know not how to make 
war without it, nor can any man tell them. 



VI 

THE HAGUE CONFERENCE: THE QUES- 
TION OF IMMUNITY FOR BELLIG- 
ERENT MERCHANT SHIPPING 



THE HAGUE CONFERENCE: THE QUES- 
TION OF IMMUNITY FOR BELLIG- 
ERENT MERCHANT SHIPPING 

By Alfred T. Mahan 

National Review^ July^ 1907 

AT the present day, when maritime commerce 
has taken on unprecedented proportions, 
and constitutes a very large factor in the power of 
states, there should naturally be some surprise 
aroused by the proposition to exempt from the 
operations of war a financial feature so important 
to the war- waging ability of a belligerent, and at the 
same time so easily accessible to an enemy. The 
paradox — for such it is — is in part the survival 
of an opinion generated by particular interests at 
a period when circumstances, though essentially the 
same as now, were in some details different. It is 
still more due to a misapplication of terms, accord- 
ing to the proverb, " Give a dog a bad name, and 
hang him." By ingeniously, though certainly 
honestly, qualifying maritime capture as the seizure 



158 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

of " private " property, a haze of misunderstanding 
has been thrown over the whole subject, investing 
it with the proverbial fallacy of a half-truth. The 
property undoubtedly is private in ownership; 
but this is only a part, and the smaller part, of the 
issue involved. 

This misconception has doubtless been furthered 
by the fact that maritime capture, as practised 
during the last great maritime wars, and still 
allowed by international law, is the direct de- 
scendant of piracy. As an argument against an 
existing condition, this circumstance is really no 
more valid than the fact that men are descended 
from apes — if so they be ; but it is, nevertheless, 
telling. If we could distinctly remember, either 
personally or historically, men in the state of apes, 
it could not but affect involuntarily our way of 
looking at men now; we might at least be more 
humble. Concerning seizure of property at sea, 
the race has kept a continuous traditional knowl- 
edge of its early methods, with a resultant impres- 
sion of its principles. The day when, as well in 
peace as in war, a strange sail was more likely than 
not to be an enemy in intention, whom you would 
have to fight in order to preserve your good and 
your life, was perpetuated nearly to our own times. 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 159 

Piracy at sea is the seizure of property by persons 
unauthorized by a national authority, even though 
the owner be an enemy and the time one of war. 
Before national regulation was instituted, this had 
been a universal condition, an era of free fighting, 
when every merchantman was prepared to turn 
robber if occasion offered. The tendency re- 
mained after regulation had become a well- 
defined system, because evasion of the law and of 
its ministers was facilitated by the slowness with 
which intelligence of marauders could be trans- 
mitted, even throughout a limited area like the 
Caribbean Sea ; and the imperfections of maritime 
police, at a period when national cruisers were pre- 
occupied with strictly belligerent operations, gave 
additional impunity. Privateers also, though reg- 
ulated vessels, under bonds to a national authority, 
were nevertheless out simply for what they could 
make; and the conditions which favored piracy 
weakened the hold of responsibility upon them. 
Kidd began as a suppressor of piracy the career 
which ended on the gallows. While the majority 
of captains and owners in the later days were men 
of integrity, no more inclined than the average 
business man to take a dishonest advantage, 
there were doubtless many entirely unscrupulous, 



i6o Some Neglected Aspects of War 

whose only test in opportunity was the danger 
of detection; and the very habit of appropriating 
another man's property by main force, however 
lawful and subject to subsequent legal procedure, 
doubtless fostered a disposition to irregular acqui- 
sition. Although a recognized — and, indeed, a 
necessary — use of national resources for a na- 
tional exigency, privateering inherently and his- 
torically had a tendency towards piracy, and piracy 
is but another name for robbery. The brutal 
excesses associated with the word were only 
incidental accompaniments of the practice, the 
essence of which was the taking of property without 
due authorization of law. 

The pa3anent of prize money, upon which of late 
years has fastened much of the odium cast upon 
maritime capture, no doubt also derives in some 
measure from the days of piracy. To privateering, 
however, it had another distinct relation. It was 
a necessary incident, calculated to stimulate 
private exertion, unremunerated otherwise, to 
come to the help of the state and to weaken the 
enemy. In the beginning the pirate took the 
goods when and as he pleased ; but the regulated 
privateer sent his prize into port. If an enemy, 
there had to be at least formal condemnation and 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping i6i 

partition; while if a neutral, arrested for trans- 
gressing international obligations, the decision of 
a prize court was essential to the validity of the 
transaction. In both cases there was not only 
seizure of property, but subsequent appropriation 
to the seizer. The process differed in nothing 
from any other legal condemnation, except that 
the goods for the most part went to the individual, 
not to the state — a circumstance not without 
analogies, such as the share of an informer; but 
attention has fastened somewhat exclusively upon 
the gain of the captor, and the violence, actual or 
potential, by which he obtained the property of the 
captured. In this has been seen the gist of the 
transaction; precisely as in war itself, to which 
such capture is an incident, attention has fastened 
upon the overt use of organized force to accom- 
plish a poHtical end, wholly oblivious of the fact 
that the whole security of society — itself the end of 
all politics — rests upon force so efficiently organ- 
ized, and so unassailable in power, that it rarely 
has to appear. Such force is so quiet in operation 
that its very existence is overlooked. All the same, 
it is paid for in the shape of legal machinery, from 
the single policeman to the last court of appeal; 
just as international peace is largely secured and 



1 62 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

paid for by the military machinery, from the private 
soldier up to the sovereign authority of the nation, 
in which rests the awful power to set the wheels 
in motion. 

Prize money thus became to popular appre- 
hension the exponent, as it were, of maritime 
capture in war. It summed up the ethics, and the 
practical aspect, of the system from which it 
derived — a curious inconsequence, but extremely 
human. Prize money was the robber's gain, 
maritime capture the robber's trade, the sufferer 
the robber's victim. The property was styled 
'^ private," and was regarded in no other aspect 
even by men who were, or from their occupation 
and knowledge should have been, perfectly con- 
scious of the economical difference between prop- 
erty in rest and property circulating in commercial 
exchange; men who understood the financial 
dependence of a state upon the commerce main- 
tained by its citizens, and who knew that there is 
practically no such thing as private — individual — 
losses distinguished from the loss of the community 
to which the individual belongs. Logically, of 
course, there is such a distinction ; but practically 
it seems strange, at this late day of economic dis- 
cussion, to hear losses by maritime capture spoken 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 163 

of as individual losses which will not substantially 
affect the community — the state. Lord Palmer- 
ston is quoted triumphantly as saying that no 
powerful country was ever vanquished by losses 
to individuals. Yet we are continually being told 
that it is an economic commonplace that there is no 
such thing as one state deriving real advantage 
by entailing disadvantage upon its neighbor; 
the community of states being such that what 
one member suffers recoils more or less upon 
each of the others. To transfer this statement 
to a community of individuals is reasonable and 
obvious. The loss of one is the loss of all; and 
this, with curious inconsistency, will be admitted 
at a later stage of the argument, pointing out the 
extensive range of individuals interested in, and 
injured by, maritime capture — the producer, 
the transporter, the handler, the broker, the mer- 
chant, the banker — no one of whom may be the 
owner of the particular property seized. Last of 
all it might be added, were not the argument too 
double-edged, and drives too close home to serve 
the purpose, the national treasury suffers. As 
between the belligerent nations, the loss of one 
may be the loss of both; but it is the proportion 
of loss and the power to bear loss which deter- 



164 Some Negected Aspects 0} War 

mine the balance of war and the settlements of 
peace. 

All this seems to me to be obvious, and I trust 
I may be fortunate enough to make it more obvious 
in the course of this paper ; for it certainly is not at 
present sufficiently so to those who write on the 
other side. " To the average mind," says one, 
" the proposition that private property on sea 
should be treated on the same basis as private 
property on land seems almost self-evident." 
Passing without remark for the present the circum- 
stance that private property on land is by the 
momentary conqueror treated precisely as to him 
seems expedient for the purposes of the war, the 
alleged self-evidence is such as can be reached in 
any case where all circumstances of difference are 
overlooked or ignored. No doubt the average 
mind is content to accept superficial resemblance, 
and to inquire no more ; but it might be asked of 
a teacher to go so far beneath the surface as to 
recognize the fundamental difference between a 
dollar in a stocking and a dollar in circulation. 
This also is obvious, though not superficial; and 
the " private property " embarked on merchant 
vessels is private property — money's worth — in 
circulation. Transportation is accumulative circu- 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 165 

lation; and, from a clear military point of view, 
the object aimed at, by the method of seizing 
vessels and cargoes at sea, is to stop the 
increase of the enemy's wealth by circulation, by 
stopping the transportation of his goods, of what- 
ever character. This is the essence of the matter ; 
the fact of the property being private in ownership 
is a mere incident ; and in making it the forefront 
of the argument lies the fallacy which has misled 
its supporters as to the principles at stake. The 
question of expediency is another and different 
consideration, which must be otherwise treated. 

History furnishes us abundant illustration of 
the divergent status and effect of property at rest 
and property in circulation, in peace as well as in 
war. In America now, at each recurrent harvest, 
the question of transportation, of circulating the 
products of the ground, gives rise to anxious dis- 
cussion, carried far into the realms of high finance 
as bearing upon the national prosperity. Without 
transportation, the farmer's crop becomes his 
dollar in the stocking; rather worse than better, 
inasmuch as for his wants coin is better than barter. 
Were the country at war, and the enemy hoped to 
increase embarrassment by denying transportation, 
is it to be supposed that he would not, to the 



1 66 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

extent of his power, order the railroads to stop 
carrying ? If disobedience ensued, is it likely that 
the offending property would not be confiscated? 
Is not property continually liable to confiscation, 
partial or total, for breach of law? But the 
farmer's ploughs, and other agricultural imple- 
ments, his household furniture, all his property 
unavailable for circulation, and therefore essen- 
tially " private," would not be touched ; nor is the 
corresponding property of individuals at sea liable 
now to seizure. Not being embarked for circu- 
lation — for commerce — it is truly private, and 
for long over a century has been strictly respected. 
In war the career of Napoleon has furnished a 
striking evidence of the effects of stopping circu- 
lation. I find, in the argument of an advocate 
of immunity for " private property " at sea, the 
statement that " Napoleon was not overthrown 
by the commercial losses of French merchants, 
but by the battle of Waterloo." Doubtless many 
causes contribute to each result, and in the appor- 
tionment of weight differences of opinion must 
arise; but I should say that foremost among the 
causes of Napoleon's fall was the fact that to the 
products of France, so wealthy in her fields, 
vineyards, and manufactures, circulation was 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 167 

denied by the fleets of Great Britain. The cessa- 
tion of maritime transportation deranged the entire 
financial system of France, largely dependent upon 
foreign custom. She could neither raise revenue 
nor borrow; both money and credit were want- 
ing. That these conditions existed is histor- 
ically certain, as is also that they reacted upon the 
government in financial embarrassment. This 
in turn provoked the Continental System, not 
merely for retaliation, but to compel Great Britain 
to peace; and the attempt to enforce compliance 
with the Continental System led to the war with 
Russia and to the subsequent uprising of Europe 
against the Emperor. Meanwhile, great as was 
Napoleon's passion for war, sheer need of money 
had driven him on to recurrent hostilities, the suc- 
cessful issue of which enabled him in some degree 
to recoup his treasury by direct assessment, — 
war indemnities, — and indirectly by quartering his 
armies indefinitely upon the conquered. This 
was for him only a partial alleviation, it is true, but 
it was something. It alone, in some small part, 
could compensate for the paralyzing loss of revenue 
caused by the cessation of maritime transportation ; 
and the enemy enforced this privation by the sei- 
zure of " private property " at sea. As for Water- 



1 68 Some Neglected Aspects 0} War 

loo, however decisive as a particular battle, it was 
but the last blow of a series — the capping stone 
of the misfortunes of 181 2-14. The downfall of 
Napoleon was due to the fact that for a series of 
years he had been wasting his armies, the manhood 
of France, her human capital, in unsuccessful at- 
tempts to restore her finances and to compel Great 
Britain to cease from capturing private property 
at sea. Recall Metternich's words to him in 1813 : 
" Sire, I have seen your soldiers; they are chil- 
dren.'* 

The instance is extreme, but in extreme illustra- 
tions demonstration is most apparent ; and, though 
extreme, it is not unparalleled. It is not likely, 
indeed, that we shall again see so predominant a 
naval power as that of Great Britain then. Let 
us, however, before quitting this part of the subject, 
note that the United States, by the same instru- 
mentality, and by the operation of the same 
causes, was in 18 14 forced to abandon all the con- 
tentions for which in 181 2 she had gone to war. 
She possessed in abundance the raw material of 
wealth, but there was no circulation. The corn, 
cotton, and tobacco were harvested, and there they 
remained, piled up, but unavailable. " Our 
finances are in a deplorable state," wrote Monroe, 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 169 



the Secretary of State. " The means of the coun- 
try have scarcely been touched, yet we have neither 
money in the Treasury, nor credit." " Even in 
this State [Maryland] the Government shakes to 
the foundation." Why? Because the transpor- 
tation of private property by sea, whether coast- 
wise or foreign, was successfully prohibited by 
the enemy. 

Fifty years later the Southern Confederacy suf- 
fered in like manner from the naval power of the 
Union — to it as extreme and irresistible as that 
of Great Britain had been to Napoleon. The vast 
store of wealth locked up in its cotton-fields was 
unavailable, because denied transportation. To 
analyze and demonstrate the precise character and 
amount of the effect thus produced upon the for- 
tunes of the Confederacy would be a work of 
minute and protracted examination, the material 
for which probably exists; but it is scarcely rash 
to affirm that the embarrassment caused by the 
depreciation of the currency and the emptiness 
of the Treasury, permeating all classes of the com- 
munity, had a dissolvent effect not only upon 
society, but upon the armies. In this connection 
I venture to support my argument by the high 
authority of Mr. Charles Francis Adams, himself 



170 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

a soldier, not a seaman, in the War of Secession. 
In his appreciative address upon General Lee at 
the centennial birthday of that great captain, he 
markedly affirms the decisive effect of the blockade 
— the " air-pump," to use his apt simile — v^hich 
was enforced by seizing the " private property " 
that sought to violate it. Lee himself is quoted. 
" Thousands of our soldiers are barefooted, a 
greater number partially shod, and nearly all 
without overcoats, blankets, or warm clothing;'' 
and later, in the dead of winter, " Further depend- 
ence upon abroad can result in nothing but increase 
of suffering and want." Better conditions of 
transportation and finance would have protracted 
the war, and subjected the endurance of the North 
to a test it might have been unable to meet. Let 
it be recalled that before Vicksbur.g, two years be- 
fore Lee's surrender. General Grant was troubled 
with doubts as to the effect of further disappoint- 
ments upon the Northern people. It is no rash 
claim that both Napoleon and the Confederacy 
were overthrown mainly by measures which de- 
pended for their energy upon the seizure of 
** private property " upon the seas. This needs 
to be clearly indicated, for another advocate of 
immunity, on " self-evident " grounds, has affirmed 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 171 

that " in the American Civil War the Confederate 
commerce was blockaded at every port, but it was 
the victory of the Union army which decided the 
contest." The destruction of the Confederacy's 
intercourse with the outer world, like some deep- 
seated local disease, poisoned the springs of life, 
spreading remorselessly through innumerable hid- 
den channels into every part of the political frame, 
till the whole was sick unto death. 

The essence of the question involved in the 
seizure of " private property " at sea is transporta- 
tion; and with three such conspicuous instances 
within a century its effectiveness is historically 
demonstrated. The belligerent state, in the exer- 
cise of a right as yet conceded by international law, 
says in substance to its adversary, " I forbid your 
citizens the maritime transportation of their 
commercial property. Articles of whatever char- 
acter, including the vessels which carry them, vio- 
lating this lawful order will be seized and con- 
demned." Seizure is made contingent upon move- 
ment ; otherwise the property is merely bidden to 
stay at home, where it will be safe. All this is in 
strict conformity with the execution of law under 
common conditions; and the practice is now 
regulated with a precision and system consonant 



172 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

to other legal adjudication, the growth of centuries 
of jurisprudence directed to this particular subject. 
Its general tendency I have indicated by certain 
specific instances. It is efficient to the ends of 
war, more or less, according to circumstances; 
and by distributing the burden over the whole 
community affected it tends to peace, as exemption 
from capture could not do. If the suffering of 
war could be made to fall only on the combatants 
actually in the field, the rest of the nation being 
protected from harm and loss by the assured 
ability to pursue their usual avocations undis- 
turbed, the selfishness of men would more readily 
resort to violence to carry their ends. 

In support of the widespread effects of interrup- 
tion to transportation, I gladly quote one of the 
recent contendents for immunity of " private prop- 
erty " from maritime capture. Having on one 
page maintained the ineffectiveness of the seizure, 
because individual losses never force a nation to 
make peace, he concludes his article by saying : 

"The question interests directly and vitally 
thousands of people in every country. It is of 
vital importance to those who go down to the sea 
in ships, and those who occupy their business in 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 173 

great waters. It appeals not only to every ship- 
owner, but also to every merchant whose goods 
are shipped upon the sea, to every farmer whose 
grain is sent abroad, to every manufacturer 
who sells to a foreign market, and to every 
banker who is dependent upon the prosperity of 
his countr)mien." 

I can do little to enhance this vivid presentation 
by an opponent ; yet if we add to his list the butch- 
ers, the bakers, the tailors, shoemakers, grocers, 
whose customers economize; the men who drive 
drays to and from shipping, and find their occu- 
pation gone; the railroads, as the great common 
carriers, whose freights fall off; the stockholders 
whose dividends shrink ; we shall by no means have 
exhausted the far-reaching influence of this inter- 
meddling with transportation. It is a belligerent 
measure which touches every member of the hostile 
community, and, by thus distributing the evils 
of war, as insurance distributes the burden of 
other losses, it brings them home to every man, 
fostering in each a disposition to peace. 

It doubtless will not have escaped readers famil- 
iar with the subject of maritime prize that so far 
I have not distinguished between the interruption 



174 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

of transportation by blockade and that by seizure 
on the high seas. The first, it may be said, is not 
yet in question; the second only is challenged. 
My reason has been that the underlying military 
principle — and, as I claim, justification — is the 
same in both; and, as we are deahng with a 
question of war, the military principle is of equal 
consideration with any other, if not superior. The 
effect produced is in character the same in both. 
In efficacy, they differ, and their comparative 
values in this respect are a legitimate subject for 
discussion. In principle and method, however, 
they are identical; both aim at the stoppage of 
transportation, as a means of destroying the re- 
sources of the enemy, and both are enforced by 
the seizure and condemnation of " private prop- 
erty " transgressing the orders. 

This community of operation is so evident that, 
historically, the advocates of exemption of private 
property from confiscation in the one case have 
demanded, or at the least suggested, that blockade 
as a military measure cannot be instituted against 
commerce — that it can be resorted to only as 
against contraband, or where a port is " invested " 
by land as well as by sea. This was Napoleon's 
contention in the Berlin Decree ; and it is worthy 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 175 

of grave attention that, under the pressure of 
momentary expediency, the United States more 
than once, between 1800 and 181 2, advanced the 
same view. This I have shown in my history 
of the War of 1812.^ Had this opinion then 
prevailed, the grinding blockade of the War of 
Secession could not have been applied. If we 
may imagine the United States and the Confed- 
erate States parties to a Hague Conference, we 
can conceive the impassioned advocacy of re- 
stricted blockade by the one, and the stubborn 
refusal of the other. This carries a grave 
warning to test seeming expediency in retaining 
or yielding a prescriptive right. There is no 
moral issue, if my previous argument is correct; 
unless it be moral, and I think it is, to resort 
to pecuniary pressure rather than to bloodshed to 
enforce a belligerent contention. As regards ex- 
pediency, however, each nation should carefully 
weigh the effects upon itself, upon its rivals, and 
upon the general future of the community of 
states, before abandoning a principle of far- 
reaching consequence, and in operation often 
beneficent in restraining or shortening war. 

It has been urged that conditions have so 

'Vol. i. pp. 146-148. 



176 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

changed, through the numerous alternatives to 
sea transport now available, that the former 
efficacy can no longer be predicated. There might 
be occasional local suffering, but for communities 
at large the streams of supply are so many that the 
particular result of general popular distress will 
not be attained to any decisive degree. Has this 
argument really been well weighed? None, of 
course, will dispute that certain conditions have 
been much modified, and for the better. Steam 
not only has increased rapidity of land transit for 
persons and goods ; it has induced the multiplica- 
tion of roads, and enforced the maintenance of 
them in good condition. Thanks to such mainte- 
nance, we are vastly less at the mercy of the seasons 
than we once were, and communities now have 
several lines of communication open where formerly 
they were dependent upon one. Nevertheless, 
for obvious reasons of cheapness and of facility, 
water transport sustains its ascendency. It may 
carry somewhat less proportionately than in old 
times; but, unless we succeed in exploiting the 
air, water remains, and always must remain, the 
great medium of transportation. The open sea is 
a road which needs neither building nor repairs. 
Compared with its boundless expanse, two lines 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 177 



of rails afford small accommodation — a circum- 
stance which narrowly limits their capacity for 
freight. 

In a less degree the same advantage inheres in 
natural watercourses. For construction and 
maintenance, streams like the Thames, the Rhine, 
the Hudson, and even the Mississippi with its 
levees, do not approach in cost the easiest of land 
routes; while for facility of traffic in large quan- 
tities no four-track railroad approaches them. In 
them Nature has laid the road on the generous 
scale which she has granted to water, and main- 
tains it largely by her own action. For such per- 
manent reasons, coasting trade, national or inter- 
national, continues between points which have 
unbroken land communication, even in competi- 
tion with highly developed railroad systems. The 
tonnage annually freighted on the Great Lakes 
of North America exceeds six millions; yet all 
points on those lakes can communicate with each 
other by land. Waiving, therefore, the cases of 
continents, between which there is no land com- 
munication, as Europe and America, and of islands 
like Great Britain, Japan, Australia, it is plain 
that water transportation must continue to fill a 
very large place in that circulation of merchandise 



178 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

which we call commerce. This means that it must 
remain, as it now is, a factor in a system, a great 
and important wheel in a complicated machinery 
of interchange. If this is so, impairment of it 
must materially derange the whole, to the detri- 
ment of the nation. 

We. need not go very far to seek contemporary 
illustration of the influence of diminished trans- 
portation. The American difficulty of moving 
the crops offers a precise analogy to the effect of 
stopping ocean traffic. At present that recurrent 
embarrassment is not merely a question of finance, 
of ampler currency. It is due also to insufficient 
railroad lines and rolling stock — that is, to trans- 
portation deficiencies. It matters not whether 
such deficiency is, as we say, original, or that it 
results from impairment, such as the depredation of 
an enemy. The point is the insufficiency, not the 
cause of such insufficiency; in fact, it may profit- 
ably be noted that in the immediate instance the 
embarrassment exists in the face of conditions, the 
gradual growth of which permitted foresight and 
provision to meet them. How manifold more 
injurious and disturbing if the cause were a sudden 
dislocation of the transportation system by war, 
throwing a new and unexpected burden upon 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 179 

roads presumably no more than adequate to a 
usual maximum of trafi&c ! The very scale upon 
which commerce is now conducted, the facilities, 
conveniences, luxuries, which it has introduced 
into ordinary households, while swelling its vol- 
ume, have made greater and more far-reaching the 
effects of any obstruction. The stoppage of a 
coasting-trade, the closing of a few principal ports 
of entry, would so congest the trunk lines of a 
national system that the influence would be felt 
instantly in every shop and household, and speedily 
in the national treasury. People also are now more 
luxurious, less hardened to bear, impatient over 
privations which their predecessors would hardly 
notice. The phrase *^ artificial wants " is no 
vain expression. 

For an example, consider France, a country 
exceptionally fortunate in maritime and land wise 
position. She has three coast-lines, of which the 
longest is upon the great ocean itself. There 
no narrow passage, as the Channel, nor short 
seaboard, as in the Mediterranean, embarrasses 
her access to the outer world. She has, besides, 
several land frontiers — Belgium, Germany, Switz- 
erland, Italy — by any one of which she may 
receive supplies. These relatively numerous points 



i8o Some Neglected Aspects of War 

of contact with the outside world — pre-eminent 
among them being Belgium and the Bay of Bis- 
cay — make the situation of France unusually 
favorable, when compared with most countries 
having Continental boundaries. All cannot be 
conceived shut at the same time, and the guaran- 
teed neutrahty of Belgium presents an alternative 
nearly absolutely secure. Nevertheless, as a 
mere question of transportation, if we suppose only 
Havre, Nantes, and Bordeaux closed to commerce, 
there can be httle question that the additional 
burden of local handling, and subsequent railway 
carriage, thrown upon, say, Antwerp and Marseilles, 
would sharply test the system of distribution by 
railroad ; and the collection of customs at the land 
frontier would introduce further impediments. 
To utilize German ports in addition would involve 
a greater circuit, every mile of which — as, indeed, 
of that through Belgium — would add to the ex- 
pense of the consumer by all the heavier charge 
and more meagre supply of a lengthened and 
overweighted land carriage. 

Such derangement of an established system of 
sea transportation is more searching, as well as 
more easy, when the shipping involved has to pass 
close by an enemy's shores; and still more if the 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping i8i 

ports of possible arrival are few. This is conspicu- 
ously the case of Germany and the Baltic States 
relatively to Great Britain, and would be of Great 
Britain were Ireland independent and hostile. 
The striking development of German mercantile 
tonnage is significant of the growing grandeur, 
influence, and ambitions of the empire. Its 
exposure, in case of war with Great Britain, and 
only in less degree with France, would account, 
were other reasons wanting, for the importunate 
demand for naval expansion. Other reasons are 
not wanting; but in the development of her mer- 
chant shipping Germany, to use a threadbare 
phrase, has given a hostage to Fortune. Except 
by the measure advocated, and here opposed, of 
exempting from capture merchant vessels of a 
belligerent, with their cargoes, as being " private 
property," Germany is bound over to keep the 
peace, unless occasion of national safety — vital 
interests — or honor drive her, or unless she 
equip a navy adequate to so great a task as pro- 
tecting fully the carrying trade she has laboriously 
created. The exposure of this trade is not merely 
a matter of German interest, nor yet of British. 
It is of international concern, a circumstance 
making for peace. 



1 82 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

The retort is foreseen : How stands a nation to 
which the native mercantile shipping, carrying 
trade, is a distinctly minor interest, and therefore 
does not largely affect the question of transporta- 
tion? This being maintained by neutrals, the 
accretion of national wealth by circulation may 
go on little impaired by hostilities. The first most 
obvious reply is that such is a distinctly speciahzed 
case in a general problem, and that its occurrence 
and continuance are dependent upon circum- 
stances which frequently vary. It lacks the ele- 
ments of permanence, and its present must there- 
fore be regarded with an eye to the past and future. 
A half-century ago the mercantile marine of the 
United States was, and for nearly a century before 
had been, a close second to that of Great Britain; 
to-day it is practically non-existent, except for 
coasting-trade. On the other hand, during the 
earlier period the thriving Hanse towns were 
nearly the sole representatives of German shipping, 
which now, issuing from the same harbors, on 
a strip of coast still narrow, is pressing rapidly 
forward under the flag of the empire to take the 
place vacated by the Americans. 

With such a reversal of conditions in two promi- 
nent examples, the problem of to-day in any one 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 183 

case is not that of yesterday, and may very well not 
be that of to-morrow. From decade to decade 
experience shifts like a weather-cock; the states- 
man mounted upon it becomes a Mr. Facing- 
Bothways. The denial of commercial blockade, 
the American national expediency of 1800, sug- 
gested by such eminent jurists as John Marshall 
and James Madison, would have been ruinous 
manacles to the nation of 1861-65. ^ govern- 
ment weighing its policy with reference to the 
future, having regard to possible as well as actual 
conditions, would do well before surrendering 
existing powers — the bird in the hand — to 
consider rather the geographical position of the 
country, its relation to maritime routes — the 
strategy, so to say, of the general permanent situa- 
tion — and the military principles upon which 
maritime capture rests. In that light a more 
accurate estimate will be made of temporary tac- 
tical circumstances, to-day's conditions — such, for 
instance, as set forth by the present Lord Chan- 
cellor of Great Britain.^ In his letter, favoring 
immunity from capture for " private property," 
disproportionate stress is laid upon the dangers 
of Great Britain, the points which make against 

* The Times of October 14, 1905. 



184 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

her; a serious tactical error. The argument 
from exposure is so highly developed, that the 
possible enemies whose co-operation is needed to 
secure the desired immunity for " private " 
property might well regard the request to assist 
as spreading the net in the sight of the bird ; a 
vanity which needs not a wise man to detect. On 
the other hand, the offensive advantage of capture 
to Great Britain, owing to her situation, is, in 
my judgment, inadequately appreciated. 

The writer has fallen into the mistake which our 
General Sherman characterized as undue imagina- 
tion concerning what " the man on the other side of 
the hill " might do ; a quaint version of the first 
Napoleon's warning against ^' making a picture 
to yourself." The picture of Great Britain's 
dangers is overdrawn; that to her enemies — 
" the full measure of the mischief we could do to a 
Continental nation " — is underdrawn. It would 
seem as if, in his apprehension, " the disastrous 
consequences ' which would flow from even slight 
depredations by commerce destroyers on British 
shipping " could find no parallel in the results to 
a Continental trade from British cruisers. France 
or Germany, for example, shut off from the sea, 

* Indirect, I presume. — A. T. M. 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 185 

can be supplied by rail from, say, Antwerp or 
Rotterdam; but it is apparently inconceivable 
that, in the contingency of a protracted naval 
war, the same ports might equally supply Great 
Britain by neutral ships. Alternate sea routes 
close, apparently automatically; only alternate 
land routes stay open. Thus undue weight is 
laid upon defensive motives, where the offensive 
requires the greater emphasis. The larger mer- 
chant tonnage of Great Britain involves a greater 
defensive element, yes; but are not defensive 
conditions favorably modified by her greater 
navy, and by her situation, with all her western 
ports open to the Atlantic, from Glasgow to 
Bristol and round to Southampton? And is not 
the station for such defence identical with the 
best for offence by maritime capture? The 
British vessels there occupy also a superior position 
for coal renewal; the difficulty of which for an 
enemy, threatening the Atlantic approaches to 
Great Britain, seems too largely discounted by 
imaginations preoccupied with hostile commerce 
destroyers. 

The concluding sentence of Lord Loreburn's 
letter contains a warning familiar to military 
thought. " Great Britain will gain much from. 



1 86 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

a change long and eagerly desired by the great 
majority of other Powers. ' ' The wish of a possible 
enemy is the beacon which suggests the shoal. 
The truth is, if the British Navy maintains supe- 
riority, it is to the interest of her enemies to have 
immunity from capture for " private property; " 
if it falls, it is to their interest to be able to capture. 
The inference is safe that probable enemies, if 
such there be, and if they entertain the wish as- 
serted, do not expect shortly to destroy the British 
Navy. 

While unconvinced by the reasoning, it is re- 
freshing to recognize in this letter a clear practical 
enunciation which sweeps away much sentimental 
rhetoric. " I urge [immunity for private property] 
not upon any ground of sentiment or humanity 
(indeed, no operation of war inflicts less suffering 
than the capturing of unarmed vessels at sea), but 
upon the ground that on the balance of argument, 
coolly weighed, the interests of Great Britain will 
gain much from the change." I more than doubt 
the conclusion; but its sobriety contrasts pleas- 
antly with the exuberances, " noble and enlight- 
ened action," " crown of glory," and the like, with 
which it pleases certain of our American advocates 
to enwreathe this prosaic utilitarian proposition. 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 187 

A possibility which affects the general question 
much more seriously than others so far considered, 
is that of neutral carriers taking the place of a 
national shipping exposed to capture under present 
law. This is one phase of a change which has 
come over the general conditions of carrying trade 
since the United States became a nation, and 
since Great Britain, three-quarters of a century 
afterwards, formally repealed her Navigation 
Acts. The discussion preceding this repeal, to- 
gether with the coincident Free Trade movement, 
preceded by but a few years the Treaty of Paris 
in 1856, and gave an impulse which doubtless 
facilitated the renouncement in that treaty by 
Great Britain of the right to capture enemy's 
property under a neutral flag. The concession 
was in the air, as we say ; which proves only that 
it was contagious, not that it was wise. Like 
many hasty steps, however, once taken it probably 
is irreversible. 

The effect of this concession has been to legalize, 
among the several great states signatory to the 
treaty, the carriage of belligerent property by 
neutral ships, in which previously it had been 
liable to seizure. In its later operation, the con- 
demnation of the enemy's property had not in- 



1 88 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

volved the neutral carrier further than by the 
delays necessary to take her into port, adjudicate 
the question of ownership, and remove the prop- 
erty, if found to be belligerent. Such detention, 
however, was a strong deterrent, and acted as an 
impediment to the circulation of belligerent wealth 
by neutral means. It tended to embarrass and 
impoverish the belligerent; hence the removal of 
it is a modification of much importance. Neutral 
shipping thus is now free to take a part in hostili- 
ties, which formerly it could only do at the risk 
of loss, more or less serious. To carry belligerent 
property, which under its own flag would be open 
to seizure, is to aid the belligerent ; is to take part 
in the war. 

In considering such an amelioration, if it be so 
regarded, it is possible to exaggerate its degree. 
If a nation cherishes its carrying-trade, does a 
large part of its transportation in its own vessels, 
and is unable in war to protect them, the benefit 
of the innovation will be but partial. Its own 
shipping, driven from the sea, is an important 
element in the total navigation of the world, and 
the means to replace it will not be at once at hand. 
Neutrals have their own commerce to maintain, 
as well as that of the weaker belligerent. They 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 189 

would not undertake the whole of the latter, if they 
could; and, if they would, they will not at once 
have the means. Steamships driven off the sea, 
and for the moment lost to navigation, cannot be 
replaced as rapidly as the old sailing-vessels. 
Moreover, neutral merchants have to weigh the 
chances of hostilities being short, and that the 
banished shipping of the belligerent may return in 
its might to the seas with the dawn of peace, mak- 
ing their own a drug on the market. In short, 
while the belligerent profits from a change which 
gives him free use of neutral ships, whereas he 
formerly had only a limited use, a considerable 
embarrassment remains. The effect is identical 
in principle and operation with that before indi- 
cated, as resulting from blockading a few chiei 
harbors. A certain large fraction of transporta- 
tion is paralyzed, and the work done by it is 
thrown upon ports and roads which have not the 
necessary facilities. It is as though a main trunk 
line of railroad were seized and held. The general 
system is deranged, prices rise, embarrassment 
results, and is propagated throughout the business 
community. This affects the nation by the suffer- 
ing of thousands of individuals, and by the conse- 
quent reduction of revenue. 



I go Some Neglected Aspects of War 

It would seem, therefore, that even under mod- 
ern conditions maritime capture — of "private" 
property — is a means of importance to the ends 
of war; that it acts directly upon the individual 
citizens and upon the financial power of the bel- 
ligerent, the effect being intensified by indirect 
influence upon the fears of the sensitive business 
world. These political and financial consequences 
bring the practice into exact line with military 
principle ; for, being directed against the resources 
of the enemy, by interrupting his communications 
with the outer world, it becomes strictly analogous 
to operations against the communications of an 
army with its base — one of the chief objects of 
strategy. Upon the maintenance of commun- 
ications the life of an army depends, upon the 
maintenance of commerce the vitality of a state. 
Money, credit, is the hfe of war. Lessen it, and 
vigor flags ; destroy it, and resistance dies. Accept- 
ing these conclusions, each state has to weigh the 
probable bearing upon its own fortunes of the 
continuance or discontinuance of the practice. 
From the military point of view the question is not 
merely, nor chiefly, " What shall our people escape 
by the abandonment of this time-sanctioned 
method?" but, "What power to overcome the 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 191 

enemy shall we thereby surrender?'' It is a 
question of balance, between offence and defence. 
As Jefferson said, when threatened with a failure 
of negotiations, " We shall have to begin the 
irrational process of trying which can do the 
other most harm." As a summary of war, the 
sentence is a caricature; but it incidentally 
embodies Farragut's aphorism, " The best de- 
fence is a rapid fire from our own guns." For the 
success of war, offence is better than defence ; and 
in contemplating this or any other military meas- 
ure, let there be dismissed at once, as preposterous, 
the hope that war can be carried on without some 
one or something being hurt; that the accounts 
should show credit only and no debit. 

For the community of states a broader view 
should be taken, from the standpoint that what- 
ever tends to make war more effective tends to 
shorten it and to prevent it. Neutrals have 
always been inconvenienced by war, but in the 
intricate network of modern commerce the injury 
is more widespread. It is more than ever desirable 
to prevent an outbreak ; and should one occur it 
would be sound policy for neutrals coldly to refuse 
to aid either party. 

In past days, while reading pretty extensively 



192 Some Neglected Aspects of War 

the arguments pro and con as to the rights and 
duties of neutrals in war, it has been impressed 
upon me that the much-abused Rule of 1756 
stood for a principle which was not only strictly 
just, but wisely expedient. The gist of the Rule 
was that the intervention of a neutral for the com- 
mercial benefit of a belhgerent was as inconsistent 
with neutrality as it would be to help him with 
arms or men. The neutral was not to suffer; 
what he did habitually in peace was open to him 
in war — except the carriage of contraband and of 
cargoes hostile in ownership ; but what was closed 
to him in peace it was contrary to neutrality to 
undertake in war for the belligerent's easement. 
If the states represented at The Hague would 
adopt a code of neutrality forbidding any enlarge- 
ment of a neutral tonnage, in the carriage for a 
belligerent, over that practised in peace; if they 
should agree concerning blockade-running that 
not only are ship and cargo open to condemnation, 
but the crew to imprisonment, as engaged in 
belligerent service; if they would forbid the ex- 
tension of loans by neutral capitalists to govern- 
ments actually at war; if, even, they would re- 
establish the rule that an enemy's property in a 
neutral ship is lawful prize ; they would do a much 



Belligerent Merchant Shipping 193 

better stroke for the world's peace than by granting 
immunity to the commerce of a belligerent, which 
is the proposition before us. So far from an 
amelioration, this is an incentive to war by remov- 
ing one of its evils, and that an evil which strikes 
the whole belligerent community, not merely the 
navies and armies in the field. Removal, there- 
fore, is contrary to sound policy, and to an acknowl- 
edged experience that the more deadly and exten- 
sive in operation the instruments of war the less 
frequent and the shorter the appeal to arms. 
The capture of an enemy's property at sea, when 
in process of commercial exchange, is a weapon of 
offensive war. The effects are unusually searching 
and extensive, because distributed over the whole 
belligerent community; yet they are also among 
the most humane, because they act by loss of 
property while entaihng Httle bloodshed. 



THE END. 



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